Wayside Pulpit

Authentic Giving

Today I bought some gifts for the "angels" on my parish Angel Tree. An Angel Tree, most often, is an actual tree that has ornaments that list items for needy families. You take an ornament, buy the items and place them under the tree. The parish then gets these gifts to those who needed them.

Yet I wondered as I was standing in line to buy a winter coat why church communities only do this at Christmas. Why not March? August? or even monthly. What is it about Christmas that moves a parish to give gifts to those who need them.

If I were a less cynical soul, I could say it was the over abundance of the spirit of giving that motivated people to give gifts to strangers. Yet, how many of us are actually filled with a spirit of giving? I think it is more that we are saddled with the obligation of giving. Yet, I do not think it is this obligatory need to buy for others that motivates us to take an angel from an Angel Tree.

I think we take those angels because we feel guilty. We feel guilty not because we have more than enough, but because we cannot seem to find the strength to stand up and bring down the system of obligatory giving. We have been tamed to believe that at Christmas we must give to be loved and to be loving. Yet, we also know, deep down inside, that this belief is a lie. If we did not know, we would not buy gifts for strangers; strangers that we cannot love and who cannot give us love in return.

Angel trees allow us to give for no other reason than giving. We know this and hope that even one act of authentic giving can somehow compensate for our weakness in the face of a capitalist machine that has figured out how to commodify love.

The Advent of Nothing

I have been told they expected a king, someone like David I suppose. Yet, I am not so sure I believe what I have been told. Who knows what they expected, or even IF they expected anything.

What if they expected nothing? It would mean that individuals were doing what individuals have done throughout history; they were running around trying to live lives, put food on the table and procreate. No one even thought to wait for Jesus. If so, Jesus was unanticipated and unexpected--a messiah only in retrospect. Such a possibility of unexpecting turns Advent from a time of expectation of the known, desired and needed into a time of waiting for nothing at all.

Expectation is a lot like Disneyland; a place that both exists and does not. We believe in a dream and only when we visit in the heat of summer with screaming kids do we realize that the dream exists only in our heads. This realization can pull us one of two ways: either, we see the dream for the farce it is and embrace reality on its own terms, or we hold onto the dream, scream at the summer and hate the kids thinking they are what keeps us from the reality of the dream.

Expectation binds us to a vision of a nonexistent reality. An Advent that looks toward Jesus in the manger binds us to just that: Jesus in the manger. Maybe you want to be fastened tightly to your expectations, but how might your life be untied if you expected nothing this Advent?

Women Religious

I am spending the weekend with a group of Dominican Sisters. They have to be, in all honesty, the coolest women I have hung out with in quite awhile. And, if things had gone just a bit different in my life, I would most certainly consider joining them. It is so strange to type that, but it is a completely true statement.

I think the Catholic church is losing something very important as its religious orders age and die. I especially think this is the case for women religious. Male religious orders are declining too, but since the church's hierarchy is made up of predominately men, the Catholic church is in no great risk of losing "the male perspective." As the orders of women religious disappear, the voice of women in the church will become even more diffused than it is today. This diffusion is what I find troublesome.

It is already challenging enough to be a women in the Catholic church. The challenge, at least for me, comes from the fact that I can only stand at the table on one side because of my gender. Where a man might want to be ordained but chooses not to because of the requirements, I am not able to make that choice. The deepest difficulty is that I am not given the chance to make that choice because I am biologically seen as not qualified. My very biological essence that gives me life is what prohibits me from choosing. Therefore, each time a priest says Mass he reinforces for all women (especially young girls) that they are, to the core, inferior.

Here is where I think women religious give an incredible depth to the Catholic institutional experience. They are a community joined together by their gender, their call to ministry, and living a vowed life. Their shared gender forces the church to deal "with women" as a collective group. Once "Sisters" is no longer a predominant grouping in Catholicism, its "gendered" voice will be gone. As that voice is silenced, the masculine voice will deepen its hold on the Catholic faith.

The scary thing about all of this? I will live to see it happen.