🎵 Holy... still

Advent Door#24

Warm wishes of the season, to you and to all you love.

This year the candlelit arrival of Christmas tonight follows soon after the closing Hanukkah candle at sundown on Monday.

🎄

In light of most current news, from here very locally to national and international venues, it is one of those particularly apt times for receiving and giving communion — in whatever ways you access and experience the sacred. (A long, cleansing shower to augment any holy water or immersion baptisms seems natural response to a couple of the impossible-to-ignore-forever stories of late, and the people who are making them news.) I’m afraid I’ll be unable to avoid thinking about and discussing some of them come January.

So tonight, I am especially glad and honored to be able to serve communion — open to all — at the 8 p.m. Christmas Eve Service at our Myers Park Methodist Church in Charlotte. If you are local and so inclined, do check out the website for details and come!

🎵 Silent night (holy night…)

The holy title-theme was a focus in a recent seasonal sermon. Senior pastor Dr. James Howell emphasized holiness as described in well-chosen examples from Christian thinker C. S. Lewis, Jewish rabbis and others: The holy not as restriction, limitation, prohibition or shaming — but rather as ignoring the trivial, the meaningless to allow an opening of our interior spaces for the sacred.

For me this coalesces naturally with the depth-psychology tradition. Jungian thought, as well as Eastern and other contemplative traditions, further centers the holy with its etymological links with the whole… holiness as moving toward wholeness. In this view, the sacred, “bigger than ourself” process is not only our opening of interior space but also the allowing-in, consciously engaging with and integrating (rather than fragmenting, or stuffing/avoiding) the disparate inhabitants of those spaces within us! This is integrity in its defining most basic — and holy — form.

Now comes the part of the Christmas Eve newShrink message that may seem a little familiar to longtime readers. It’s repeated because it again expresses what is most up, and true now.

🎄

As always, best moments at this soulful-darkness time of year tend to arrive when pulled to inner stillness and reflection.

With more than a little irony, often those moments are evoked and animated by very big voices…

“Still, still, still (… the night is cold and chill…”)*

Seasonal spirit arrives with more full force for me some years than in others. In either case the Mormons’ big-choir voices don’t fail to deliver it. (My preference is the older, more classical sacred-music versions like this piece, not the made-for-TV-special ones full of glitz and overlays.)

So in keeping with previous years’ tradition I recommend a simple, treasured song, with the one pictured my preferred, nearly a cappella, version.

(This sampling from Spotify — the link in the subtitle of this section and in the Spotify icon above — and illustration of the album should help for browsing wherever/however you get music.) Do be aware, in this beautiful rendition, the “stillness” is only up to about 4:20 minutes, after which it transitions to louder, more raucous medley!

At Solstice time, this always somehow points — a little counter-intuitively — to how the light is already returning, the days growing longer… even as we speak.

0r…sing.

🎄

And, that is all I have. Talk to you soon. (And newShrink content-focus resumes in the New Year.)

🦋💙 tish

… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”

If the Spotify links above have timed-out, you can redo a search on your own. My apologies for the inconvenience, if so.

🔵