Catching Up from Thanksgiving

And I'm back. I took a break during, well, the break from school. Said break consisted of me driving up to Oklahoma, spending the holiday with my family, and driving back on Sunday.

Had I been posting regularly, I'd likely have covered the following topics, each of which formed part of my mental blogging:

Bacon-wrapped turkey: we attempted this, lured by our love of bacon. It replaced our standard herb-butter rub. The verdict? Not impressive. Some of the bacon was crispy (as bacon should be); other parts were that kind of sad-floppy ham one gets when bacon is essentially boiled instead of fried or broiled. Some possibly related, possibly unrelated temperature weirdness (the thermometers read underdone, underdone, underdone--and then suddenly waaaaay too done!) combined with the unappetizing bacon to make this a low turkey year. Back to herb rub for Christmas.

Popup shops and local stores in Oklahoma City: OKC never gets enough credit, I think, for being a surprisingly cool town. It has a thriving arts scene, a robust independent food culture, and a lot of neat offerings for folk interested in Okie-made stuff. Yay, Oklahoma.

Knives Out: We saw this mystery movie from Rian Johnson in OKC with my sister and brother-in-law. It's quite fun, with a stellar cast. There's a fascinating racial/colonial subtext: whiteness eating itself. The final shot, with [SPOILER REMOVED] sipping from a coffee mug reading "My House," is the perfect button on that statement.

The Protoevangelium of James: I had to rush back home from OKC Sunday in time to prep a 7 AM Monday morning Advent lesson. We're using Amy-Jill Levine's Light of the World. Levine is a Jewish professor at Vanderbilt Seminary who writes a lot of books for Christians about Christian scriptures. It's an impressive feat of ecumenical empathy, watching her shift into the mindspace of a believing Christian. I'm enjoying it thoroughly and learning a lot.

I was teaching Chapter 2 about the annunciation of Mary and the Mangificat. Among the insights Levine shares is a reference to the Protoevangelium of James (aka The Infancy Gospel of James, The Nativity of Mary, and The Gospel of James), an apocryphal book from the second century. Though the early church by the third and fourth centuries had recognized the work as pseudepigraphic and rejected it from canon, its narrative proved popular enough to infuse Christian thought.

Levine analogies the text to midrash, a practice of (as she puts it) "filling in the blanks" left by scriptural accounts. In my reading (I sought out and read the whole thing--it's pretty short), it seems more like a fan fiction prequel to the Gospels: All About Mary. It's from this work that practically all the non-biblical stuff we hear about Mary (especially in Catholic and Orthodox traditions) comes. The Protoevangelium gives Mary two parents, Joachim and Anna, who after years of infertility, finds herself blessed with an angelic annunciation: she's to have a special child. It's here that we find fully expressed the idea that Joseph must have been elderly, a widower with sons of his own (these become Jesus's brothers mentioned in the canonical gospels).

It's here, also, that we get the idea that Mary was a perpetual virgin--before, during, and after Jesus's birth. The nativity narrative is fascinating. Mary and Joseph find refuge in a cave, not a manger. Joseph goes out to look for a Jewish midwife. All of creation stands still, but he finds a midwife. The midwife witnesses the miraculous birth (kind of a divine C-section: Jesus just appears) and fetches another midwife, Salome, to check whether Mary is still intact.

That's right, folks: the Protoevangelium of James contains the first recorded gynecological examination, described in fairly graphic detail. Salome inserts her digit into Mary only to find that (1) Mary is miraculously still a virgin, and (2) the hand that did the testing burns and whithers (it's later healed).

Wild stuff.  That led me to do a bit of research about the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity. I found to my surprise that, historically, most Christians have affirmed this bit of non-biblical theology (including John Wesley). Only with the Calvinists did this idea fall out of favor with Protestants. It remains important to Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians. I can't quite figure out why it's significant that Mary be imagined as perpetually virginal, but I'm content to remain happily agnostic. (Of course, the virginity of Mary is itself somewhat contested, especially since the Isaiah passage often cited as prophesying Jesus's birth to a virgin represents something of a mistranslation from the Hebrew. Almah in Hebrew just means "young woman of marriageable age," where as the Greek parthenos means "virgin" specifically.)

Anyway--it makes for a fascinating discussion in Advent class.

And that's what I would have been blogging about had it not been for the holiday.

Advent Reflections

Back from traveling, gearing up for the mad rush of stuff-to-complete-before-Christmas. On the way back from my sister's house in OK (an 11-hour drive), my partner and I processed several hours of conservative evangelical podcasts covering a range of fun topics. Our conversations about those topics gave me notions for half a dozen things to delve into and write about here.

For now, though, I'm moved to put that on pause and recognize that today is the first day of Advent, the lead-up time to Christmas.

Growing up in the Southern Baptist Church, Advent was unknown to me. Starting around Dec 1, our church would start in on the Christmas hymns--a whole month of them. The very fist hymn I learned to play as accompaniment was "Away in a Manger." To this day, I adore Christmas hymns (the doctrinal ones especially) with a passion impervious to the requisite yuletide pessimism about consumerist takeovers of the holiday. I'm ready for Christmas--and Christmas hymns--starting, roughly, February.

It was a shock for me, then, to join a church which celebrated Advent, which is intended as a kind of buffer zone before Christmas, a time for Christians to focus on and prepare for Christ's coming rather than to celebrate his having already arrived. Oddly enough, the church where I first encountered Advent was the university-affiliated Baptist church I've written about previously--the one where my father served as custodian instead of pastor. I didn't really get it except to note (and lament) how there was a lot less Christmas hymn-singing than I preferred.

Joining the Methodist church meant confronting the reality of Advent more overtly. No Christmas hymns at all until, oh, the week of Christmas Day--if that. Instead Methodists have a whole other ("other" from my Baptist perspective, that is) subgenre of hymns dedicated to Advent ("His Promised Coming" as the hymnal puts it): "O Come, O Come Emmanuel"; "Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus"; "People, Look East"; and frankly more that I don't really know well. Indeed, a lot of the hymns we sing are newly written, as if the Methodist church has only recently decided that Advent is for a different kind of hymn than Christmas carol.

I remember being a bit resentful of Advent, partially because the festival reinforced to me everything foreign in the Methodist church. I had a bit of pride as a Baptist in knowing how the church year worked, knowing how the hymnal worked, knowing how services worked--in general knowing Baptist stuff pretty well. Being a Methodist meant starting almost from scratch. A Chrismon tree (see here)? The wreath with the candles (see here)? That awful, sing-songy "Light the Advent Candle" ditty (see here)?

And no "Away in a Manger."

My parents in their respective services would generally arrange a kind of read-through-the-Christmas-scriptures (i.e., a service of lessons and carols) in which they could pack in all the favorite hymns in one super-service. So we did eventually get to sing Christmas hymns. But it wasn't the same as the month-long celebration of favorite carols I had loved as a child.

As I've grown older and perhaps more patient, though, I've come to appreciate Advent on its own merits. Actually, what helped me to appreciate Advent most was my having to become familiar with another bit of orthodox liturgy--Lent. Lent, of course, describes the forty days prior to Easter in which Christians meditate on and prepare for the Redemptive Act of Christ's suffering, death, and resurrection. It kicks off with Ash Wednesday, which I privately think of as a kind of Christian Apocalypse Day, on which it is appropriate to contemplate one's own mortality, the fragility of life, and the grace that passes understanding.

Advent, by contrast, struck me (strikes me still) as a kind of anti-Lent, by which I mean a dialectical complement to Lent. If Lent is the Last Supper, the Night in Gethsemane, the Holy Saturday--the time of tense waiting when hope seems stripped away--then Advent is a happy expectation, the sunlight at the end of a long tunnel, the welcome pregnancy. Like Lent, it deserves its stillness, its holy moments of pause within the bustle. But those moments are moments of thrill, of getting in touch with the excitement of the Good Work, the New Thing that is coming. It is hope, hope, hope that makes the celebration--the fulfillment of that hope--meaningful.

I recognize that, as a Christian, much of my theology rides on the Holy Week of Christ's redemptive act and of Christ's resurrection. But what really inspires me about my faith is the fact of Incarnation, that my God gave up godhood to be with me on Earth. That Event of God-With-Us is itself an act of divine atonement--at-one-ment--with humanity.

Advent reminds me that, if sober reflection on my sin and need for reconciliation is part of my faith, so too is the command to watch hopefully, to seek hopefully, and to find and rejoice.

For that reminder to hope, I can learn a few new hymns.

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.

More tomorrow,

JF