#Other denominations might do advent wreathes

[reaperfromtheabyss]

Calling All Catholics!

Weird thing for a Jew to post I know I know but hear me out here.

I would like to hear from Catholics (current and ex/raised),

what do you feel separates your religion from others (both other sects of Christianity and other religions as a whole? what feels unique or specific to you/your culture/your beliefs/your church? this can be theological beliefs, practices, or even aesthetics

what things feel "inherently Catholic" or "Catholic coded" to you?

if you don't mind, would you also include what subset of Catholicism you are/were raised in (Roman, Byzantine, Irish, Opus Dei, etc)?

As you may have guessed, this is for research, and I personally only have experience with Roman Catholicism (and limited experience at that, more cultural than truly religious). I would love to hear from a larger subset of people. My family is extremely Italian Catholic but that's just one very specific version, and I don't have much/any experience with any others. I'm curious to see what the common ground is.

Reblogs/signal boosts are appreciated as I doubt I have like a SUPER broad Catholic following myself lol!

[actualmermaid]

Hey Christians

I am once again getting reports that some of you are appropriating Jewish holidays and traditions, and 🌠 you should immediately stop doing that 🌠

Since I'm also a Christian, maybe you'll take this better from me. I usually see this behavior from people who are white, American, and/or Evangelical-adjacent, and I suspect that you're messing around with Jewish stuff because you feel alienated from your own cultural background, whatever that may be. You belong to what is essentially the big-box-store version of Christianity, and you're probably hungry for something that feels more "authentic." That's 100% understandable! But it is not a reason to appropriate traditions that belong to a community that has not shared them with you!

Luckily, there are some pretty easy ways to get acquainted with your own cultural heritage through traditional Christian observances.

Get acquainted with the traditional liturgical calendar. Our observances are structured around the solar year, and historically, these observances were tied to the patterns of agricultural labor. Religious festivals also had seasonal significance: the birth of Jesus coincides with the lengthening of days after the winter solstice, the resurrection of Jesus coincides with the rebirth of plants and animals in the spring, and so forth. The more you learn, the more you realize how much we've lost/forgotten!

If you know where your ancestors came from, you can research how folk-religious festivals are practiced in those parts of the world! What foods are eaten? What games are played? What stories are told? If there's a church associated with "your" cultural community, you might consider visiting them around important festivals and learning what they do. Remember, you are a student, and you should still approach these observances with respect and openness!

Here's a non-exhaustive list of things to try if you're feeling the temptation to appropriate a closed Jewish practice:

Instead of observing Rosh Hashanah because you're feeling left-out by the lack of major Christian holidays at this time of year, start looking forward to the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi (October 4). Here in the US, it's common for churches to hold a special "Blessing of the Animals" service or a "St. Francis the Peacemaker" service, often in cooperation with churches from other denominations! It's a lot of fun!

Instead of trying to host your own Passover seder (I have a horror story about this that I will refrain from sharing out of respect for my Jewish friends), just celebrate Easter like the rest of us! Easter, not Christmas, is the most important day in the Christian liturgical year. There are MANY ways to celebrate Easter in a more "traditional" way than you might be used to.

Celebrating Hanukkah as a Christian makes you look fucking stupid! Don't do it! Instead, if you want a multi-day traditional Christian observance, our things are the seasons of Advent and Christmastide! Again, depending on your cultural background, there are lots of ways to "practice Christianity" around this time. Fasting (similar to fasting during Lent) and lighting the candles on an Advent wreath are easy ways to start.

Don't try to observe Torah, that's not our thing! If you want to practice more "rules," consider trying out one of the many Christian fasting traditions (NOT the "Daniel Fast," which is basically a crash diet attached to some very bullshit theology), praying the Daily Office or using prayer beads, or wearing a head-covering in church. ("But I'm not Catholic," you might say, but if you do some research you'll discover that none of these things are unique to Catholics! You're not Jewish either, but that's not stopping you from messing around with their stuff!)

Before you come at me with excuses about this not being "biblical" or whatever, keep in mind that many Jewish observances are also not "biblical"! If you really want to try out a Jewish holiday, you should make a Jewish friend and let them invite you, but it's pretty hard to make Jewish friends if you're constantly trying to steal their shit! (The last 2000 years of Jewish-Christian relations are hard proof of this!)

[blessedarethebinarybreakers]

sort of urgent since december is almost here? so i’ve been raised celebrating christmas, but we barely focus on the religious aspect of it as it’s more of my parents’ families that are religious about it. but i want to strengthen my faith and whatnot, and i suppose i’m just wondering what Advent is (i’ve had advent calendars and use them but..just for the chocolates whoops) and what i can do during the christmas season to make it feel more like the religious holiday that it is

Hi there! Great question, sorry for the delay. 

Advent is a time of waiting and of preparation for the coming – for the coming of Jesus as God incarnate in an infant born to a poor young woman in Bethlehem; and for the coming that we still anticipate, that of Jesus’s return to us.

For me, Advent is a time when I remember and reflect on how we live in an already-and-not-yet sort of era: Jesus has already come, has already saved us and has already announced the coming kingdom; but in our own lives and world we do not yet see all the fruits of that. So Advent is a time when I ponder how I can be an instrument of God to help usher in God’s Kin-dom, the one that already is and yet has yet to come. 

I posted on my Facebook to hear from seminary friends about their thoughts on Advent, and I got some great responses! Here is what they say.

From my classmate Lindsay: "advent is a season of anticipation and preparation, of paradox and tension, of grief and hope. We actively wait and prepare for the coming of Christ by acknowledging the brokenness of the world and of our hearts. We paradoxically look to the future by looking to the past while staying firmly rooted in the reality of the present. We claim that the joy of the incarnation only makes sense when we fully recognize the depth of our lament. Thus, we light candles in the darkness, we sing songs of longing and expectation, we lament the things in need of  lamenting, cultivating a remembrance of just how much we are in need of God showing up in the world—in all the wondrous ways God does, but exemplified in the incarnation.”

From my classmate Kate: “Lindsay aced it, so I’ll share personal elements.  On a very practical level I find the effort to live in the tension of waiting incredibly powerful for learning to live with an anxiety disorder. On a larger level, I have had conversations with others where advent speaks to the waiting and longing for social justice. We live into hope and find ways to work towards the promise we want to see.”

Earlier today I posted a YouTube video where Bishop Robert Barron discusses Advent as a preparation for revolution. He says that Advent is not the “cozy” time we sometimes treat it as – rather, when we prepare for Christ’s coming both in the form of a baby in a manger and as a triumphant king returning, we are preparing for revolution. The social order is turned on its head by Jesus, and we anticipate that with both solemnity and joy.

As to what you can do to observe Advent in a more religious way, the first thing to note is that while our secular culture celebrates Christmas basically as soon as December hits (or even sooner), Advent and Christmas are distinct seasons in Christianity (for those denominations that celebrate them). Advent begins four Sundays before Christmas (for 2017, that’s December 3!) and ends on Christmas Eve. The Christmas season, then, does not begin until Christmas day and lasts till the day before the Epiphany (January 6). 

To observe Advent in a meaningful way, some things you might do include:

creating an Advent wreath so that you can light one of its candles each week.

finding a devotional that suits you and making time to pray with it each day. Does anyone know of good devotionals for this Advent? The one I am using has to be ordered and is found here; there are many that are available online for free too. 

reading scripture, perhaps from Isaiah, Luke, or Matthew. You might follow a lectionary like the one found at textweek to get your daily readings. 

read poetry by Christians! write your own poetry! consider what it means to anticipate revolution, to lean into God’s Kin-dom, to prepare the way of the Lord.

Does anyone else have more thoughts on Advent and how to observe it?

[killingthebuddha]

A few years ago, I purchased a little nativity scene that held a tea light inside. There it sat at a local fair trade holiday sale, a surprisingly Christian symbol on a table strewn with reindeer, snowmen, the pointy shapes of evergreen trees, and other apparently more secular reminders of the holiday season.

I hesitated. I’d long since discarded, I thought, most traditional Jesus-centered observances at Christmastime. Every December my interfaith family throws open its home to the promise of light, whether that be the light of eight candles burning, the light found in a tiny baby’s new life, or the return of light after the darkness of the solstice. We decorate our home in hues of blue and white, red and green, mixed together in a blend that nevertheless recognizes each tradition as its own, and the progressive religious tradition in which I’ve long found a home celebrates many meanings in the December season.

My hand hovered over the candle holder, with stars cut through the dome of sky to let the candle’s light out. Painted in matte colors with basic, almost childish strokes, Mary and Joseph cluster around the figure in a tiny cradle, simple houses and desert plants hovering in the background. No wise men, shepherds, or angels visit the scene, just the one small, growing family, and stars hanging in the sky above.

I brought the nativity scene home, and set it on our table.

* * *

Every year it hits me, this nostalgia, a backwards glance at Christmases past. It’s my own version of the December dilemma, the difficulty of a holiday connected to and yet separate from the specificity of one tradition. Could I do Christmas without Christ, as I’d been doing for years, letting angels, snowmen and scented evergreen stand in for all the other meanings of the season? Yes, my mind wanted to say, of course I can! After all, our modern-day Christmas originates with the merging of the Roman holiday Saturnalia as a convenient time to celebrate the birth of Jesus, later layered with northern European traditions of Father Christmas and evergreen trees.   

And yet, purchasing the little nativity scene convinced me that I had unfinished business with the religion of my youth, and that winter, I went back to the denomination I hadn’t visited in years, one that lights an Advent wreath and sings the real words to hymns like “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and “Once in Royal David’s City,” rather than universalized alternatives set to the same tunes. I decided to give putting Christ back in Christmas a thorough church season or two of effort. Wouldn’t it be more honest to keep this reason for the season intact, if I still felt drawn to it? Didn’t it make sense to return to a place where a single symbol conveyed a world of meaning?

*  * *

                                                       When I was a child, we set our nativity scene up on a Japanese-style medicine cabinet that stood in the front hallway. When I was old enough to carefully remove the wooden figurines from the funny shredded paper packaging that kept Mary, Joseph, the wise men, and a few shepherds and angels safe from year to year, it felt like a rite of passage. I’d attained an age when I could handle delicate, sacred matters, carefully arranging Joseph and Mary around the empty wooden cradle, hanging the biggest, blue-robed angel, the one with a white “Gloria in excelsis” banner, on the old nail at the top of the rough wooden scene.

Jesus always sank during the year to the bottom of the paper shavings, and we’d put his naked little plastic self into one of the top drawers of the cabinet, one of the drawers that didn’t contain a host of unused coupon clippings or random stashes of ribbons, buttons, and other long-forgotten supplies. Come Christmas morning, my brother and I were too busy with Santa, stockings, and a plate full of once-a-year Christmas cookies to worry too much about the baby hidden in his dark, lonely manger of a deep wooden drawer. My parents watched us opening gifts, the baby Jesus equally forgotten, our parents equally sidelined by the effusive magic of the present morning.

Usually we remembered Jesus sometime in the early afternoon, after the presents had been opened, breakfast cleared away, my brother and I lost in a pile of new packages, my mom in the kitchen preparing a traditional Christmas dinner. Inevitably, someone would call out, “we forgot the baby Jesus!” and we’d all laugh, run to the manger scene, tenderly lay the naked plastic figure in his cradle, and return to our other activities.

*  * *

Nostalgia paints the world in tones of sepia and roses, offering a false picture of a past that may not keep its promises for the present. Leigh Eric Schmidt, in his now-classic book Consumer Rites (which explores the consumerist origins of our modern holiday traditions), translates the yearly December nostalgia as a concern in “modern, industrialized societies for the genuine, the handcrafted, the authentic, or the real. Modern holidays and their rituals are thought to be sadly insubstantial, ersatz, or hollow; they are never so good, genuine, joyous, or fulfilling as they used to be.”

If it seemed that my own celebration of December holidays had fallen prey to this suspicion, to the fear that my winter-themed, commercialized holiday was somehow in tension with a more “original” meaning, that complaint didn’t quite match the mood in which I bought the blue nativity scene. We kept the Maccabees in Hannukah alongside our menorah and eight days of gifts; why did I feel I had to celebrate a Christ-less Christmas? My nostalgia-fueled holiday critique bypassed the issue of commercialism and went, instead, straight to questions of religious certainty and substance.

There it was on my dining room table, that seemingly innocuous symbol. “What a cute family!” my five-year-old daughter exclaimed as soon as she saw it, asking immediately that the family face her, and not her sister, as we sat down to eat. How could I explain that this wasn’t just any family; this was Jesus and his family?

That night, we lit candles for Hannukah; we lit a tea light in the nativity scene. I stumbled through an explanation that Christmas­­­­––in addition to being a time of warmth and light and family closeness in the dark time of year, not to mention the gift-giving that was paramount in my daughters’ minds––was also the celebration of the birth of the little baby in that scene right there, and that Christians believe this baby came to save the world.

My academic explanation didn’t last long with my five-year-old; she wanted to know what her parent believed. I wanted to know, too.

In trying out my childhood church again, I wanted to touch something holy as if it could be solid and certain. If I could welcome the baby Jesus onto my dining room table, surely there was room in my heart, mind, and body for one more layer of meaning?

I stuck with my childhood church tradition until Easter, feeling the familiar rituals of crossing myself, kneeling for confession, and taking Communion. The actions settled through my body like warm hot chocolate after a long time out in the snowy cold. By Easter, though, my mind had failed to catch up. Words about the “only son of God” stuck in my throat alongside unshed tears, and I found myself thinking about my daughter’s interest in the little family at the manger. Did it have to represent just that one particular family? Couldn’t God be found in more persons than just this one? Could I not also sing, in a riff on Leonard Cohen’s song “Who by Fire,” who in a manger; who in a refugee camp; who on a dusty plain, a humble home, an antiseptic hospital? Which flickering flame of life would provide hope when it was needed most?

Symbols hold not just one meaning, but many. They convey truth not because they are unequivocal, but because they’re multivalent, metaphorical. Wax melts when touched by a candle’s flame; it softens like a heart, and shifts.

***

Nostalgia looks back to a past supposedly more whole, more perfect, more full of promise than the present moment, but Advent, as a season of the church, looks forward in hope to the coming of a better day. What an irony that we spend so much time dreaming of Christmases past and their possible perfections!

In the wrong hands, nostalgia can be dangerous. It gives a false picture of a past that never was. Jesus has never truly been the only reason for the season, any more than America once was greater than it is now. Most of our holiday nostalgia, thankfully, is no more dangerous than baby Jesus being forgotten in a coupon drawer, but nostalgia’s sticky emotional resonance can lead us away from the promises and challenges of the present into an unfounded feeling of what we might have lost. We fear we can’t live up to the past; we face depression, loneliness, and despair as we try to make the holidays shine ever more brightly.

Nostalgia’s illusion can make the holiday season more laden with difficult emotion than it needs to be. Memory creates a powerful pull in that we think we should feel a certain feeling when the holidays roll round, but when we don’t, we assume, automatically, that we’re in the wrong. We assume we’ve fallen away from how things were, a how that must have been more certain, more solid, more joyous than we knew. The truth of both Christmas past and present may be closer, in fact, to the dull ache of difference, a thought can ease our way to holidays of the future. If we can let go of the idea of one single truth or one perfect past, perhaps we can find a little bit of Christmas peace.

In Winifred Gallagher’s Working on God, a memoir of exploring faith after years of leaving church deep in her own past, she interviews an Episcopal priest who was raised in the Salvation Army. “I don’t go back to the Salvation Army,” the priest says, “but I miss it terribly. There’s this sadness about not being there, because even the soap in the bathroom smells right!” It’s possible, the priest realizes, to find spiritual maturity in knowing when one needs to move beyond one’s nostalgic memories, even the memories that smell right, or that feel so familiar deep within the body. Advent challenges cultural Christians, post-Christians, and believers alike to embrace not old nostalgic memories, but new meanings, ones that bring hope for the future.

I sometimes still return to that same church, but I no longer expect it to feel the same as it once did. To miss a tradition doesn’t make it false, but missing it also doesn’t mean it holds the corner on truth, either. Truth, at least as far as memory and tradition are concerned, shines through when something solid softens, and becomes malleable.

Light flickers out through the stars cut in the sky of the nativity scene. Is this a light that shone for just that one holy season, or is it a light that shines when we need the reminder of hope the most? This time, I do not need one answer; the way the candle dances is enough.