Advent: The Paradox

photo credit: tatum teels

Lord, deliver!
Rend the shiver
As our swollen
bodies lie
In the dark net
of the "not yet"
where we, wandering,
fear to die.
From "Adventus"

I sit down this evening to write and my heart is full with so many things. I am happy because I have spent the last several days with the best sampling of family and friends. I am overwhelmed by the generosity of people who have not much more than we have ourselves, yet give lavishly. I am wistful because we are having our woods cleared and replanted and there is an ache inside me when I think of how pillaged it will look...how long those trees grew. I am grateful because I know what it is to love and be loved. I am cozy because the sun curtsied goodbye with the colors of saffron and I am cold because there is none of summer's riot to the show. I am perfectly content and discontent all at once, happy and sad, up and down, satisfied and yearning, peaceful and anxious.
Today is the first Sunday of Advent. It is perhaps the only month in the twelve where the paradoxes are realized in this old event of waiting for the coming. The coming of Christ. The re-coming of Christ. We are content, peaceful, gentled, joyful in the assurance that it will happen. We are unsatisfied, anxious, pacing, saddened that we wait yet a while longer. And the preciousness of this season for me is the permission to feel myself torn in half sometimes by the beauty that is not yet versus the beauty that is right now. I often find myself upset by the many, conflicting minds of me. Have you ever felt your soul wrung by the fact that though you long for heaven's joys, there are beautiful moments that belong peculiarly and perhaps only to earth, and you wonder if you'll miss them? Moments like laughing so hard that you choke on your lemonade; moments where you slowly freeze with a friend's arm thrown companionably around you while you watch the sun set and nearly suffocate with bonfire smoke; moments where an Irish beat pounds as you reel down and down and down a line that never ends; moments where the stars are so clear and close you feel as if you could reach up and pluck one. Maybe in the new heaven and on the new earth, we'll have lemonade and choke with laughter too. I'm certain there will be sunsets more glorious than any I've seen here. Maybe there will be wild Celtic dances in the timeless time and we'll never retire with aches in our sides. Maybe the stars will be ours for the touching and we'll wear them in our hair. Perhaps it will be all these things and more. I know that the stabs of joy I experience in these earth-moments are so precious to me because they are reflections of the joy to come. But there is a fierceness in me that clings to earth because it is home. It is not home, but it is familiar. The familiarity is a home in itself. Heaven is unfamiliar, or rather so familiar it seems strange, so homelike it is almost unrecognizable as home.
So I long for earth.
And then I hear news of wars, plagues, uprisings, children brutally murdered by psychotic parents, abortions, terrorism, pain. Pain everywhere. And when I think it cannot get worse, death happens. I know our souls are immortal, that we are beings created for eternity, but again, earth has a beauty of its own. Because I live here, I want to be comfortable here. I don't want to know that if one of my beloved friends or family dies, that I will never be able to see them again until eternity. I want them to be here to snort lemonade with me, to nearly suffocate around the bonfire, to make my arms ache with the force of a grand reel. People sicken and grow old and their bodies belong less and less to earth. I wait for things. I wait for many things. I wait for a man who will pledge his life to mine and sometimes the waiting is especially hard. Not because I am tired of waiting, but because the people who are growing old and sickening belong to my heart. I want my grandmother to be at my wedding more than anything. And while time wears down her body and her lungs grow weary, I am still waiting. There are no men. There are no weddings. Will there be no Grandmama as well? And in those moments I ache as I have never ached before with wanting eternity. No more wars. No more separations. No more death. No more sickness. No more strife and arguments and tears and financial worry. I sin again. And again. And again. I doubt, I stumble, I fall, I rise, I deny, I admit, I inflict hurt, I ask forgiveness. And some moments I hate my beloved earth with a passion deeper than all the rest. I long for Christ. To be in His presence and have all this blown away in the glory of Himself. I thought I wanted earth when what I really want is eternity and a life in His presence--literally. In His presence. Able to reach for His hand and wander an amber wood and just adore Him. This is the thing for which I was created and I realize that I'll never be at home on earth. Earth is just a passing-through. Glory is beyond. But the real kicker? I'm stuck here. You're stuck here. We're stuck having precious earth and wanting wondrous heaven. Loving heaven but clinging to earth. Aching for what we'll leave, breaking for what we know is before us. The End is withheld. For now. It is coming but it has not come. You aren't imagining the feeling of pacing a room you love, scenting change in the air, knowing that any moment the glorious unfolding will gloriously unfold. But the "will" is not the "has."

Advent is a paradox. Your paradox, my paradox. Christ's paradox.
Weakness and strength.
Baby and King
Here and There
Now and Soon
We are the "and" in these arrangements. We don't belong to either world yet. Too much alive for heaven, much too immortal for life. But we have been called to a paradox and who are we to complain? Life is the messy bits. Our call is to live the paradox and draw into it the souls around us. Advent is the time when we remember this. The ache under my breast-bone is not a bad thing. The love I have for this life and the passion I have for the next are not meant to be lived one or the other. Somehow they combine. Some messy, messy way they do.

Advent: the coming. I wait with open arms.

"For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace; Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end." -Isaiah 9:6-7

Whence Came the Scars

This short story or flash-fiction is rather different than usual. Thoughtful. I wrote it after thinking for some time about the gift of grace and how--for one of us--it isn't free. And what a wonder it is that Jesus keeps extending that grace to us. Anyway. I hope you enjoy it and can, possibly, relate.

He bent over his knees, the suffocation of guilt pressing him to the marble floor in a way no discipline had yet managed. Breath seemed futile in his shame, but breath came anyway, swift and hot in the pocket of air between his belly and knees. The throne room was empty and silent, but he would come. He always knew when one of his brothers had arrived. Armeddeonan spat a curse on himself into the stillness and his breath quickened. The skin of his belly and chest flashed on and off his sweating thighs like the sleek sides of a hound after a race.

How many times had he folded himself in shame, dissolved in submission and fear...and lived to hurt his older brother again? For he knew it hurt him, somehow. He was not certain how, but he knew he inflicted pain on this most gentle of men and the thought dirtied him further.

Armeddeonan flinched at the sound of the heavy doors being thrown open and the inward rush of jasmine-scented air. His brother had been walking in his gardens again among the pure beauty of the warm summer night while Armeddeonan had been less...nobly occupied.

“Brother, why lie you on your countenance in so sorrowful a state?” His voice was rich and quiet and he drew near with an easy step.

Armeddeonan crumpled deeper into his fold and despised the kindness that chose not to accuse him.

“Please arise,” he said and his courtesy held a regal command both imminent and gentle.

Heart pounding, senses alert, Armeddeonan arose and stretched himself to his full height. In stature, he now stood a head taller than his brother, but he had never felt more insignificant and yet significant than he did now with that comprehensive gaze on his features.

“Good evening, my brother,” Armeddeonan murmured.

“Good evening.”

He watched the uncertain torchlight burnish his brother’s crimson robes to burgundy and play on the auburn flecks in his dark hair. His face was patient and kind but the scars driving up his arms and extending, as Armeddeonan knew, across his back and shoulders showed him capable of bearing untold sorrows. How did he get the scars? What kept them fresh and red when time ought to have bleached them skin-smooth?

“I have not come merely to say hello,” Armeddeonan said at last. He had spoken too loud and startled the shadows into activity. A dark breeze fell through the open doorway and shook the twin torches, rattling them in their iron brackets.

When Armeddeonan looked back to his brother, he saw that the man’s eyes dwelt on his features as if searching for the Truth in him. Was there truth in him? Had there ever been? Pain like branding seared Armeddeonan’s chest and bitter gall rose in his throat.

“I am sorry,” he whispered. Visions of last night--soft arms, red lips, warm bronze skin and linen sheets slayed him over again with stinking guilt. “I am so sorry.”

“Jazmeriana?” his brother asked and his glance was so swift and piercing it cut the flesh from his bones.

Armeddeonan hung his head. “Again. Always again.”

They breathed together for a quiet space of time and somewhere beyond the doors of the throne room a nightingale sang the tune of all the purity Armeddeonan had spent on the girl. The sound flayed his spirit and he clenched his tunic in his fists, willing the creature to die with its song in its throat.

“Did you enjoy it?” his brother asked. “Jazmeriana’s company?” From anyone else, the question would have seemed insufferable, laden with accusation and despising. From Armeddeonan’s brother, it was only a question.

“I did.” Armmedeonan ground out between clenched teeth. “I always do.” That was what stung like the sting of a thousand bees. It was only here, in the throne room in the presence of his scarred brother, that he ever felt the weight of his wrongs. In Jazmeriana’s arms, he had no thought but pleasure. She did not capture him--he sought her. There was no question of whether the guilt was his own. It was there, pungent and horrible in his mind’s eye.

“Why must it be so good?” he spat in contempt of himself and his problems.

“Because it was created good,” his brother said with quiet finality. “But not to be stolen and enjoyed in a hurried corner by those who will not swear the oath that makes it beautiful. You cheapen it. The gift is not yours.”

Cheap? He was not cheap--he was extravagant. That was why he stood here now, bent and sweating and horrible. He never thought of the price of anything--his nights with Jazmeriana or any of the hundred other sins that now crowded his thoughts. How much did it cost anyway? His head throbbed with the reckoning under the warm pulse of the night. The price to be paid was death--it was death to break the King’s law. How many times over would he need to die to pay it off? Gooseflesh stood up along his bronzed arms even as the sweat dripped down his chest.

His brother waited, silent and sure in the darkness.

“I know I have sinned against my King,” Armeddeonan said at last, head bent. “I am willing to pay the death-price. Forgive me.”

The nightingale sang again but this time it sounded like liquid sorrow and he felt tears joining the sweat on his face. He knew what would come now and he hated and craved the mercy of it, white against his blood-stained blackness.

His brother stepped in and pressed firm, warm lips to his forehead, and the kiss was scented with triumph and grace.“I stand in your stead,” he whispered, pulling away.

Their eyes locked. Armeddeonan tried to look away. He could not look at the golden knowing in his brother’s eyes. He could not accept this. How many times had his brother taken his death-punishment for him? For him and for every one of his subjects in the realm? How many times would he still insist on carrying for them their sins? Was he not weary of the same pageant over and over again?

“It is not a pageant,” came the voice, heavier now as if it came from the center of a soul much-wearied by a weight it bore. “You belong to me. To my King. You are my brother.”

Armeddeonan sliced the air with one fore-arm. “I am adopted! I have spat in the King’s face with my sins!”

“You are my brother,” he repeated. “I have chosen to carry your debts.”

They shared a long look and the shadows of the room closed in about them except where his brother stood, and here a crimson glow shed like drops of blood from his robes. His brother put out a hand and grasped Armeddeonan’s.

“You have been bought at a price,” he whispered, and his lips curved into a smile, curious for its mingled joy and gravity. “Go now, and sin no more.”

A feather’s breadth of a moment and his brother had gone, leaving Armeddeonan alone in the throne-room. He realized he had been holding his breath, and let it out in a ragged stream. He felt cooler and clean now, and he knew his ledger had again--for the untold time--been blotted clean. But there was another stirring beneath the relief; a pulsing in his blood that begged him to keep this moment in his soul and by it, live his life.

On quiet, humbled feet, Armeddeonan hastened across the room. He would thank his brother--he must do that, at least. He tugged open one of the great doors with as little noise as he could manage and stepped into the moon-washed whiteness of the garden. He made to descend the steps of the portico, but a gut-rending sound stopped him short and clenched his heart with cruel fingers.

The sound of a whip lashing the air. The slap of it biting into the skin. A faint cry, then silence. The whip again, the fleshy cut, the painful noise. On and on the hellish thing played and its notes wound tendrils of disgust and hatred over Armeddeonan’s chest. He could not yet discern from whence it came. Why did his brother allow whippings to be carried on in his own garden? It was not like him. Quickly now, before the victim could be beaten any more, Armeddeonan loped across the yard. The stones were cool under his bare feet and jasmine perfumed each breath he drew. A fountain burbled moon-diamonds at his right and the nightingale continued to haunt his hearing. Where was the man?

He entered a circle of pyracantha bushes planted like a thornsome crown around a white sandstone piazza and there he saw a thing that knit terror and confusion into his heart. His brother stooped below a cloaked figure with a whip, back bare and open to the bite of the leather. The figure whipped him with a sickening regularity. Lash, lash, lash, lash.

Frissons of sickness quaked inside Armeddeonan’s gut. He saw whence came the scars.

What's to be the pill in all this jam?

When a random person chucked us a random magazine that had something to do with Creationism, the very last thing I expected to find inside was a very lucid article regarding the topic of How To Write Christian Fantasy. A very good article, by-the-by, and one I found most intriguing. The writer had several points I hadn't considered. But the one thing I found myself nodding along to was the mention he made of common pitfalls in writing Christian Fiction. As in any sort of writing, there are ways to do it and ways not to do it.
So how does one write Christian Fiction? I'll give you a few tips.

"Rule Number One: Obey All rules."

Now how did Barney Fife get into this post. Honestly. I believe the Crustimony Proseedcake in such cases is to over-moralize. The first thing is to be sure you don't over-moralize. There is nothing worse than a moral tacked onto the end of a book. Or the beginning of the book. Or all through the book. The thing is, morals don't have to be taken like pills. I shall revert to the Duchess of Wonderland's advice on this:

"'Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess. 'Everything's got a moral if only you can find it.'"

That is the key to writing good Christian fiction. A moral or two jabbed on the plot at a jaunty angle does not make your book "Christian." A mention now and again of your characters saying grace before a meal makes for a weak testimony. The fact that they go to church and a scriptural allusion now and again is not much more helpful.
Inversely, books like C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe never once out-right say they are "Christian" and yet one can't help but see the parable all through. That book is simply dripping with a rich understanding of Christ's kingdom. The morals in that book are quite obvious because they are distilled like a sweet fragrance all through the tale.
Honestly, who wants to be served a dish of morals on a silver platter? How would you like it if you came to read a story that chopped along something like this:

"He raised his sword and poised it at his enemy's throat--"You will die, villain, because you are prideful--Pride goeth before a fall...well....I'm your fall."

That is plain and simple awfulness. You don't need to be so obvious in your writing. You see, it all comes down to a simple question of world-view. If your mind has been exchanged from a callow, worldly mind to one focused on heavenly things and on glorifying Christ, His standards will flavor every word that comes out of your pen. You don't need to constantly try to plug in Bible verses in every other sentence because the whole of the book will reflect your world-view. If your world-view is flawed, so will be your morals. If it's a good, healthy, well-developed world-view than that will carry your standards into the plot. In fantasy this is particularly important, as you don't usually have the option of deeming your characters devout Protestants who always pray before every meal (even snacks) and quote Scripture at each other all the live-long day. ;) (Not that quoting Scripture is wrong. It has it's place, definitely, but I detest books where the dialog is entirely made up of try-to-fix-holes-in-the-plot quotations.)

To again reference the Duchess, "everything has a moral." Even things you don't think have morals. They are either good morals or bad morals. The key is to finding the moral and sprinkling it evenly through the plot, not building sandcastles with it at either end of the book. Do that, and people are likely to doubt your sincerity. After all, what sort of person forgets about their objective till the very end of a thing? Obviously they mustn't care too much about the point.

Just a thing or two to think about. :)

When the dawn opened.

Gladly the dreads I felt, too dire to tell,
The hopeless, pathless, lightless hours forgot,
I turn my tale to that which next befell,
When the dawn opened, and the night was not.  

-Dante's Inferno

Every person has a religion. Generally I avoid that term like the plague--it carries such a horrid feeling of dry-bones and long tradition and deadness with it. But I use the term in lieu of the fact that I haven't found a better one that is so all-encompassing.
 That explained, it's a fact, despite the myriads of human beings who deny their allegiance to any sort of "religion" in the general sense. I would boldly declare [again] that everyone has a religion. Your religion may be the Religion of No-Religion. But Man was created to worship and whether it is worshiping Jesus Christ, as it should be, or whether it is worshiping your own ideas of no-worship, it happens. It's built into the very fiber of our being. We need to understand that in order to live in this world--it's a fundamental truth that is often overlooked. And this is issue no less important than in literature. I know that many authors have done far better and more thorough jobs of the topic in longer posts, but I thought I'd just tell you a bit about where my Scarlettania and Gildnoir lies in this plethora of rabbit-trails.

Gildnoir worships neither God, nor any other sort of material idols. They reverence battle, warriors, skill with the sword, and allegiance to one's country and clan. That is the long and short of the doctrine of Gildnoir. Most obey it and bend knee to this god of War but others, namely a certain Diccon Quarry--are not content with this life and they almost unconsciously refute this War-god by forsaking their clan and breaking allegiance with their country. Diccon cautions Fitz-Hughes not to swear by the Hand that made him, for he will find the Hand's punishment far worse than that Diccon proffers. It's a primitive scheme, but rather powerful--even the Greeks and Romans had bouts with such a god in their day.

Scarlettania is a bit different--as it is essentially a fairy-tale world, it mirrors closely our own. There are church-men, there is truth, there is light. The Light is not exactly clearly named, for it filters into that world from our own and a little something is lost in the translation, but they are, like the places in Pilgrim's Progress, beautiful and just and noble. They crave light and live in the light and, did they live in our world, they would be God-followers. There is no definitive mention of Christianity in Scarlettania and Gildnoir, and yet I have made certain to keep Darkness and Light separate, meaning for the light to be from the one True Light: Jesus.

Diccon Quarry comes out of Darkness craving...he knows not what...and yet he is drawn to Scarlettania as if by an invisible hand and he finds Light. He finds purity and honor and love and truth. It's a beautiful paradox that I never grow tired of.

You see, I am not finished thrashing out all the details yet, but Christianity gets to this world shadow-like. Enough to cause one of the characters to wistfully remark to one of the Macefield bunch that at least earth-folk have an unerring Hand working in their lives. Thus it is that the Macefields learn to turn to the Author who is perfect.

And this is where things get muddled-er, if that's a word. Because you see, since Scarlettania is a make-believe country full of make-believe people who are all dictated to by Mr. Adoniram Woolcott Macefield, he is, in essence, their god. Not that they worship him--oh no. But he is writing their story just as God has written ours. Everything, truly, revolves around the Pen of Macefield. They swear by it and their oath is concrete after having that mighty name before it. They wait for his inky decrees as pilgrims wait for a sign on high. So you can imagine their delight, slight trepidation, and awe when a whole covey of sons and daughters of Macefield drop into their laps. The Scarlettanians frequently mention the fact that they are celebrities:

"Never let it be said that I let a daughter of Macefield wear rags when there are gossamine gowns at hand..."

Charlotte says she finds it uncomfortable to be in the position of a sort of demigod and looked upon with such reverence and awe.

Comments like that pepper the book and provide amusement on one hand and a slight bitter-sweet flavor on the other...I am not sure I am making much sense, but I was trying to extract from the annals of my mind just what was going on with religion and my Gypsy-Song.
But one thing is certain: as I write this book and realize how erring the hand of an authoress really is, I am ever more thankful that Jesus has written my story with perfect precision. There will be no rewriting and no editing is required. I've got the real deal in my Savior. He is Author, Editor, and Publisher all rolled into one....yes. We earth-folk have a blessed existence indeed.