A Reflection for IV Advent All Saints’ Church, Southern
Shores, NC December 21, 2014 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
Come
On-a My House
Today on the Fourth Sunday of Advent we light the
fourth candle on the Advent Wreath which is the symbol of love. The three other
candles are symbols of hope, peace, joy, and now the fourth – Love.
The coming
of God fully into our humanity is a gift of love, and this week we prepare for
the coming of Christ to live in our houses. Where is the room for Christ in
your house?
How do we plan to invite Christ? I was listening to recordings of many singers -Rosemary Clooney,
Julie London, Bette Midler, Madonna among them - singing their own version of “Come On-A
My House, a song written by William Saroyan and Ross Bagdasarian, and I thought that theirs may
not be the most subtle way to issue an invitation, even though the second verse has a Christmas theme:
Come on-a
my house, my house, I'm gonna give you Christmas tree
Come on-a my house, my house, I'm gonna give you
Marriage ring and a pomegranate too, ah
Come on-a my house, my house, I'm gonna give you
Marriage ring and a pomegranate too, ah
Come on-a
my house, my house a come on
Come on-a my house, my house a come on
Come on-a my house, my house a come on
In-a Pat’s and my house inside the front entrance, down
the hall by the stairs, there is small dresser with the top laden down with
objects like books, stones, icons, symbols, representations all jumbled up
together. All these things have meaning to us for they are reminders of those
times when we came into contact with the sacred. They constitute an altar of
remembrance for us. Most of the time we treat it as holy space, but sometimes
we just throw our keys or mail on it as we rush to do something else. For weeks
at a time I will ignore that piece of furniture and then suddenly I am hit by
the abundance of meaning and am called up short.
In-a the rest of my house, on every wall there are
pictures and pieces of art; I think there is still about 12 square feet which
is not yet covered with something with which we fell in love. We got them
because they were pretty but also we kept them because they pointed to an
aspect of the divine. There are many days when I will look at one piece, being
lost in wonder as I remember when we got it and what it meant to us, when we saw
it as a portal to the numinous. Yet, there are many days when I just walk in
and my mind is so busy that I don’t notice a thing.
Lots of things are in-a our house and when we die,
all of these things which have so much spiritual value will have very little
material value in the marketplace of commerce, and many of these spiritually precious
but commercially worthless things will end up in thrift shops, but as long as
we live there, they remind us that this house is Holy Space. This is-a my home,
the house in which I dwell, the place I go to know that I am loved and safe,
and the place in which I invite others to come to give or receive blessings. It
is my home, but it is also God’s, and I am its steward.
In the Hebrew Testament lesson from 2nd
Samuel for today, King David decides that he wants to build a home for God -
which is a nice sentiment - and the writer of this part of the story has fun
with the Hebrew word for “house” which has four meanings in this periscope: “palace”, “temple”, “dynasty”, and “family
status”. The wordplay asks the question, “Which house of God does David want to
build, and which does God want to build with David?” Looking at David’s record
three chapter’s later when he enters into an adulterous affair with Bathsheba, the
wife of Uriah the Hittite who a close friend, and then concocts a plan to
murder Uriah after Bathsheba gets pregnant by David, and then plays the
mourning friend in order to take her as his wife, it appears that David may
have more interested in giving God a physical house in which to live instead of
allowing God to live inside David, so that God won’t see what is going on in
private. Sometimes we create spaces for God, religious buildings and shrines,
and we lock the doors so God won’t get out and mess up our plans. However, if
we are lucky, God will not be trapped inside religious buildings, for as the
old saying goes, “God
is a circle whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.”
In the lesson from the Gospel of Luke for today, the
angel Gabriel comes in a vision to Mary and offers God’s plan to build a house
within her in which the Holy may dwell. I think God’s angels are still making
that same offer to us, to have God live within us so that we are God’s palace,
temple, and family. The Christ event tells us that God doesn’t just live above
the skies but in the core of all of
our being.
Victor Frankl, a Nazi
Concentration Camp survivor, psychiatrist, and philosopher, had his own definition
of God and wrote, “When I was fifteen years old or so, I came up with a
definition of God to which, in my old age, I come back to more and more, I
would call it an operational definition. It reads as follows: God is the
partner of your most intimate soliloquies”. God is dwelling within us and is never far away, as Frankel found that God was also
living in the hell of a death camp, as he wrote in Man’s Search For
Meaning:
We
stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along
the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us
and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet
supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind
did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man
marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I
do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to
us."
That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And
as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time
and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both
knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky,
where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to
spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image,
imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her
smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more
luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my
life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the
final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate
and the highest goal to which Man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the
greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The
salvation of Man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who
has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief
moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation,
when Man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement
may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable
way – in such a position Man can, through loving contemplation of the
image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my
life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are
lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."
My prayer for us today is that we will find a place for God’s love to dwell in the houses of our souls. “Come on-a God’s house in you.”
“Come On-a My House.” (poem)
Bursting through Mary’s life the Angel sang
a version of “Come on-a my house, my house
come on.” Silent bells came to life and rang
Angelus to the vows of God and Virgin spouse,
of a version of “Come on-a my house, my house.
Home altar bells ring sets of altered, changed,
Angelus to the vows of God and Virgin spouse,
as divine shining light into our shadows ranged.
Home altars bells ring sets of altar changes,
and Mary goes to where is no set circumference
as divine shining light into our shadows ranges
covering sinners’ tower with love’s abundance.
Now, Mary enters where is no set circumference
going on as silent bells came to life and ringing
covering sinner’s towers with awe-full abundance,
bursting with Mary’s angels - love to us singing.
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