Using the Inner Eye

Struggling along the icy streets in town today, it occurred to me that I almost feel I don’t believe in summer any more.

Please tell me I’m wrong…?

“… blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”.
John 21:29

Dreams

Many people have told stories about waking up from a nightmare with a sigh of relief that it was not real. Did you ever wake up from one thinking: “Oh no, I have to go back to sleep and try to finish that!” ???

I did, one morning this week. In that dream, I was trying to sort out some accounts, and knew that unless I got all the figures right, neither I nor anyone else was going to get home. I’m not sure exactly where I was, I only know it had been my first day on the job, and I wasn’t even employed, just doing some kind of internship, but they still laid this huge responsibility on me. And every time I was on the verge of getting it right, something happened to interrupt me, and I had to start over…

So my very first thought when waking up was that I had to return to the dream and straighten things out, or those “other people”, whoever they were, would still be in trouble...

Readers who have been following me for a while know that I’m fascinated by dreams and dream interpretation. (You will find earlier posts on the theme if you click the label “dreams”.) So later in the day, while out walking, I kept thinking about this.

First of all, I never really felt comfortable with figures and math. This week I’ve had to check income tax return forms for myself, for my father, and for my mother’s estate (almost a year after her death), so I guess that pretty much “accounts for the accounts” - and the feeling of being responsible for getting things sorted out not only for myself but for others as well.

But then there is this other dimension... 
The fact of still not being ‘done’ sorting out the affairs of someone who left this life a year ago. A visit from a friend the other day, who just recently lost another friend of hers to cancer. Talk of funerals. Thinking of other friends – some who died, some who survived. Having to tell people about my own recent troubles. Still waiting for the results of my biopsy last week. (That in itself a strange mix of trying to forget, be positive, and prepare for new trials all at the same time.)

And in nature, outside, things slowly coming back to life after the long sleep of winter…

I had another dream earlier in the week.
In that dream, I was invited to a wedding, or rather a renewal of vows for a couple married since many years back. It was a huge event, and I had the feeling almost everyone I’ve known in my whole life was at that party. The couple inviting us was a married couple whom in real life I haven’t seen for years, but who do “connect” a lot of my other friends, because they are known to people where I live now as well as also to friends back where I lived before. They are also an international couple: one of them comes from Sweden, the other from an English-speaking country across the earth.

 

The celebration they had invited us to was a much bigger event than any I’ve ever been to. It was not all festivities; it also involved really tough challenges, like mysteries and riddles to be worked out, and finding hidden ways and keys to get out of seemingly impossible situations. For the scenery, imagine a mix of the Colosseum and some of the more impressive scenery from The Lord of the Ring…

The whole adventure began with wonder,  continued with struggles, and ended in celebration.

       

From that dream I woke up with a sense of “wow” rather than anything else. I can’t recall ever having had a dream quite like it before.

To get back to the more recent “accounts” dream. As I said, my first feeling when I woke up from that one was that I had to go back to sleep to finish what I had left behind. But then as I grew more aware of things, it dawned on me that I was home, and awake, and that I did not have to go back and finish those impossible accounts. (Phew!)

Thinking about this later, during my walk, a parallel to the message of Christian faith (as it has been written into my heart) struck me. No matter how many years we live, none of us will really be able to “finish all the accounts”. Every one of us will be leaving some unfinished business behind one day, however much we strive not to. (And of course we should strive not to.) But when we wake up on that final morning, we shall realize that we are at home, and that we will not have to go back to sort things out. It has all been taken care of.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” (Revelations 21:1-4)

Church(es)

Over the past few months, one of my Friendly Followers and Bloglings (GB) has posted a number of pictures of different kinds of church buildings in New Zealand. Somehow, his last church post (from the Anglican cathedral in Napier) led my thoughts back to a picture I had pinned up on my notice board for many years in my previous flat.
I had some trouble finding it now but at last I did. (Not on the internet, but in one of my drawers.) It's a postcard of an oil painting by a Swedish artist, Olle Olsson-Hagalund (1904-1972), entitled "Girl with plaster churches". As you can see, he depicts a girl having a bit of trouble choosing between a number of different models of churches for sale at a market.

There is no Wikipedia article in English for this artist, but if you click on his name above, the link will transport you to a Swedish website where you can have a look at some more of his paintings. His style is somewhat naivistic, very colourful, and marked by a lot of detail. He often also framed his paintings himself and then also painted the frame in his own very original style, to become part of the picture. (There are some examples of that too on that website.)

I saw a large collection of his paintings "live" at an exhibition back in the 1990s, and I think it's the only temporary art exhibition that I ever went back to three times (in a month or two) because I liked it so much. I also remember some of the things I learned about him - like the fact that when he went to his studio to paint, he used to put on his best suit! It was a feast for him to paint; and the joy of it often shows in his pictures. The painting of the girl with the churches was also included in that exhibition.

When I had that card put up on my wall, I combined it with a quote from an interview with the English writer Adrian Plass. His most famous book is probably The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass Aged 37¾ (from 1987). (Ha! I only just now learned the full title of it - the Swedish translation leaves out the 37¾! I wonder why - I absolutely love that!) There are also a couple of sequels to that first one; but the first one was especially hilarious because the first time you read it you're not prepared (or at least I wasn't) so it takes you by surprise.
It is a very humourus, fictional satire of Christian life - "including such moments as trying to move a paperclip by faith" (sentence quoted from the Wiki article).

I find the book quite unique in that Plass manages to make fun of things without ever getting really mean or bitter about them. Part of the secret might be that he lends his own name to the main character and narrator of the story. This underlines that he is not just making fun of "other people" but of himself. And somehow he manages to catch the struggles, the stupid extremes, and the grains of true faith and love in the midst of it, "all in one". (I've been in churches very much like his fictional church; pretty much every scene in the book is familiar to me.)

This blog post is all digressions so far. I wonder if I'll ever be able to get round to some sort of point?

Getting back to that little piece of a quote that used to sit on my notice board, together with the Girl With Churches picture: That interview with Adrian Plass was published in a Swedish magazine, in 1996, i.e. some years after The Sacred Diary. In the interview, Adrian mentions that through the years, he has come to realize that he really belongs to two churches. One consists of the Christian friends who he is actually spending time with, talking to, sharing his life with. That "church" has no written rules, no real structure, and no building - but nonetheless, those people are his church. But then, at the same time, there is also the church that he formally belongs to (which does have rules, and structure, and a building to meet in); and going to services there he sees as a sort of public confession of his faith and of belonging to the Christian Church as such.

Now why did I have this picture, and this quote on my wall? Maybe after my ramblings here you can more or less guess. Through my life, I have "collected" a number of churches myself. Sometimes, the choice has come naturally, because of facts of life like moving from one town to another. Sometimes, there have been choices a little more complicated. But basically, around the time that I went to that art exhibition and read that interview back in the 90s, I found myself in a position similar to what Adrian describes. In my heart, there was one church of friends. But those friends did not all go to the same building to express their faith; and in some ways I found myself (like the girl in  the picture) embracing a whole "set" of different churches (with the same basic beliefs, but some different ways of expressing them).

Nowadays, with pain problems and things like that in the picture for me as well, I don't go regularly to any church. And when I do go, I have become a bit of a "browser". But there is still a church - or the church - in my heart. And over the last year, that church has kept growing faster than for a very long time. Because (somewhat to my amazement) I keep finding "church-building" ingredients everywhere in this cyberspace: wonderings, thoughtfulness, questions, doubts, faith, discussions, prayers, longing, worship, wisdom, laughter, tears, sharing and caring! Thank you.

~♥~♥~♥~

“It's rubbish to tell people that we can easily dispose of life's huge questions once and for all. We all have times when we're bad-tempered or we grumble. We all have doubts. What's wrong with saying that?”

Adrian Plass

My Issues With "Santa"

Last week a Christmassy post at Simply Heather's blog set a rather complicated line of thoughts in motion in my head. I promised a more full explanation to a short comment I made, and this post is the result. I don't really wish to argue with the point Heather was trying to make though. That might work just fine for some readers even if it doesn't for me. It all depends on what images we have in our own head to begin with...

I think I will need to begin with certain differences between the Father Christmas or Santa Claus of the English/American tradition and the Swedish one. First of all, while you use the word Christmas, referring to the birth of Christ as centre of the holiday, the origin of the Swedish word jul has nothing to do with Christ. There is a corresponding old English word you may recognise - Yule, or yuletide, which is of pre-Christian origin. (Links go to Wikipedia articles.)

Our equivalent of Father Christmas (nowadays they're pretty much mixed up, because we get so much of British/American culture via television) is Jultomten.

In old Swedish folklore, a tomte is a fairytale figure for which the best equivalent in British folklore is probably brownie. A kind of hobgoblin or gnome are other possible translations. Basically he was a figure that lived in secret on a farm and could be of great help if you kept on the good side of him, but could play nasty tricks on you if you didn't. At Yuletide/Christmas it was customary, for example, to set out a dish of porridge and milk for the tomte; outside on the ground, or in the barn, or some place like that.

In the late 19th or early 20th century, it was a Swedish artist Jenny Nyström who created the image of the traditional Swedish "jultomte". She introduced the typical pictures that are still very popular on our Christmas cards. Below is one of them, which also includes a buck (he-goat), which in turn also belongs in the old traditions.

Before Tomten came into our Christmas gifts tradition, the gifts were delivered by a Yule Buck, or someone wearing a buck-mask, or neighbours etc would knock on the door and just throw in presents anonymously on Christmas Eve. Later on, the tomte got mixed up in this and the image blended with that of St Nicholaus/St Claus/Father Christmas from other European countries.

Tomten/Father Christmas still comes to call in person on Christmas Eve, instead of coming invisibly through the chimney in the middle of the night as he does in the English-speaking world. Here he traditionally knocks on the door, and someone wearing an extremely ugly and scary mask enters and begins by asking in a muffled and severe voice: "Are there any good children in the house?"

Now this is where my issuses with "Santa" or Tomten begin! Besides the man looking really scary, his question indicates that if you have not been good enough, you won't be worthy of his gifts. Moreover, parents know how to use this line of arguing too, especially in the months before Christmas: "If you don't behave, Tomten will know, and there won't be any Christmas presents!"

I don't remember at what age I began to suspect that Tomten was just my grandfather or uncle or someone else dressing up and hiding under that mask.  (The traditional way of getting away with this trickery is that some grown-up will suddenly decide they have to go out and buy a newspaper in the midst of the festivities. Grown-ups do so many strange things that children probably rarely question this odd behaviour.) What I do know is that the first dream or nightmare that I can remember from my childhood was one where I dreamt that Tomten came, and asked his question  - "Are there any good children here?" - and my mother (I think it was my mother, in the dream) said: NO...

This is why the image of the child's faith in Santa does not work for me as an image of faith in God.

This is also why, for many years after I became a Christian, I banished all tomte-decorations in my own home for Christmas. And if I had had children of my own, I don't think I would have agreed to try to make them believe for a moment that there was a real Santa/tomte. Since I never had children, however, that remains a theoretical standpoint...

Unfortunately, there seems to be quite a few people who got stuck from childhood on with an image of God which all too much resembles my childhood image of  Santa/Tomten: The old masked man with the beard whose first question is if we've been good enough to deserve his gifts. And if that is your image of God, then I say: No wonder if faith fails you when times get rough, and you discover that in fact all over the world a lot of good people suffer, while villains seem to thrive and get away with murder (quite literally).

But that is not the true Christian image of God at all. The true image of God is found in Christ, who stepped right into all the human suffering and took it upon himself to bring us back the gift of eternal life, without asking if we've been good enough. None of us have, that's the problem. Every one of us has a certain standard of "good" inscribed in our hearts but also the awareness that we keep failing to live up to it. Some come closer than others but still not 100%. Even small children have that awareness.

The message of Christmas is not: Try harder!
The message of Christmas is: Don't be afraid, because help will be given.

The angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David's a Saviour has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in strips of cloth and lying in a manger."
Luke 2:10-12

What a strange sign to announce that help is on its way: Can you imagine anything more helpless than a newborn baby? Landing on a bed of straw in a stable on top of all, instead of on a bed of silk or fine linen in a ruler's castle.

One thing for sure: A lot of people for various reasons won't find him "good enough". But he will know as much as anyone about the conditions and struggles of ordinary people...




PS. A few Santa/tomte figures did find their way back into my Christmas decorations later on in my life. I will return to that in another post...