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“Plan tight, hang loose”
“Plan tight, hang loose” is a favorite bit of advice. It seems to have stood the test. On the one hand, it calls me in responsibility to act, to make plans, to follow through. But it also warns me, in advance, that there is a strong likelihood that things will happen beyond my control, perhaps against my desire, leading me, perhaps, in a direction I had not anticipated. It also teaches me, in a delightfully subversive way, that from time to time, this may not be such a bad thing after all.
God surprises us and Christmas is a case in point. At Christmas power is presented to us as a child: vulnerability and weakness are taught as honorable virtues, hope is urged even in the desperation of a poor family overshadowed by dark social and political forces. God, we are invited to believe, is somehow with them as they are scorned by neighbors and hunted down by a paranoid prince.
And then the bright “Hosanna!” and “Glory to God in the Highest!”, the angels, the shepherds, the strange men from the East: it is a bright, surprising moment.
Rowan Williams writes somewhere that we need the surprise of joy to free us from the bondage of our reluctant, controlling natures as much as we sometimes need the shock of pain to free us to love. It is like the whack of the proverbial two-by-four to remind me, while I am getting on with my life, my plans alternatively coming together and coming apart, to be ‘surprised by joy’ (to steal an apt line from C.S. Lewis).
This is the subversive gift of beautiful worship, of stopping to admire lovely things and lovely people, of suddenly realizing even in the midst of a well-organized fund-raising event at church that this is wonderful!
This unplanned surprise of joy in the midst of our well-laid plans frees us to see the beauty God has given us, frees our hearts to a deeper compassion, and our hands to an unrestrained charity. We give, if we are blessed at Christmas, no longer out of a sense of obligation but rather out of a penetrating, God-given joy.
Love came down at Christmas,
love all lovely, love divine;
love was born at Christmas:
star and angels gave the sign.
- Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
Blessings!
Jamie+ |