Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller founded the It Gets Better Project in 2010 to give hope to LGBTQ teens, a population that experiences bullying and that has a suicide rate more than double that of the general population. That extraordinarily high rate is based only on cases where teens were self-identified or identified by surviving family members as LGBTQ, so the real number is probably higher. It follows a similar project in the late 1990’s called the Trevor Project. The suicide rate is higher still, eight times as high, among those subjected to “conversion therapy,†a scam in which evangelical extremists convince anxious parents that they can “straighten out†their kids. The legislature failed last year to have Maine join the fourteen US states that currently ban the practice, though we have great hopes for the coming term.
The late Harvey Milk talked about hope all the time. Referring to gay teens like the boy who called him from Altoona, Pennsylvania, Milk said “You got to give them hope. Hope for a better world. Hope for a better tomorrow.†The It Gets Better Project offers hope to the frightened.
Hope is the theme for this first week in Advent. We need hope during the inevitable time between, the time between recognizing the need to ban a cruel practice like the brainwashing and self-hatred that is conversion therapy or to address a wrong like systemic racism, and the eventual realization of justice and love as the result of selfless service by those who dream of a better world.
Selfless service is what Alan Turing gave to his nation, Great Britain, during the Second World War. The father of modern computing, he played a crucial role in breaking German codes. Some historians speculate that his critical work might have shortened the war by as many as two years and saved 14 million or so lives. Yet less than a decade later, Turing would be prosecuted for being gay, a crime in England at the time, and would take his own life rather than suffer chemical castration.
Attempts to posthumously pardon Turing met with continued resistance, failing to advance in Parliament as recently as five years ago, decades after his death. He was finally pardoned by an act of Queen Elizabeth under the royal prerogative of mercy at the end of 2013. Just last year, in what is now known as “Alan Turing’s Law,†the retroactive pardon was extended to all convicted under those hate-driven acts. Though the world will never know what Turing’s amazing mind might have given us had he lived the two or three more decades that might have been expected, there were still living victims who benefited from the pardon.
As the war broke out and Turing got to work at Bletchley Park, two of his countrymen, both also gay, were on the other side of the Atlantic. Neither mathematicians nor military strategists, their gift to the world was art. The composer Benjamin Britten and the poet W.H. Auden had collaborated on the disastrous opera “Paul Bunyan,†and both remained in the US with the men who were their husbands in all but name, in Britten’s case the performer Peter Pears, and in Auden’s, Chester Kallman. At one point they all shared a home in Brooklyn Heights, though by the time the US entered the war in 1941, Auden was teaching at the University of Michigan, and Britten would soon return to Britain.
Auden would learn of his beloved mother’s death and his husband’s infidelity shortly before he started work on his Christmas Oratorio, “For the Time Being.†Just a few years before, the poet had re-engaged Christianity and delved into the great works of that age, including the theology of Paul Tillich. The oratorio was daring, not a traditional re-telling of a miracle story, but a re-imagining of that story as-if eternally true, as a story no longer fixed to a single time and place but true in every time and place, as real in Auden’s own age and place in Western culture as in ancient Palestine two thousand years earlier.
The title of the oratorio, “For the Time Being,†captures the theme of Advent itself, waiting, for traditional theology understands us as caught between the first coming of Christ and the second. Christmas does not start until Christmas. The time being is the flowing time of day after day, in Koine Greek the word chronos, while the time to come, the time to which Auden points, the time to which Advent points, is the critical time, the right time, the propitious moment, the point of turning or fulfillment captured in the ancient Greek as kairos.
This sense of unrealized eschatology, at aiming toward a point of fulfillment, of a critical moment, gets lost in the frenzy of the season, in the forced happiness, for if you do not celebrate, if you do not over-indulge and over-schedule, if you do not out Fezziwig Dicken’s Fezziwig, then you are a failure. Never mind the culture wars, battles over Starbucks’ red cups and our neighbors celebrating Diwali or Hanukah or Kwanza or Festivus. In the midst of all of this noise, we have lost religion, our own religion, the religion of those who have told this story for two thousand years, and not because someone said “Happy Holidays.â€
It is not just the cultural misappropriation of Christmas that is to blame. Those of us that self-identify as theological progressive have so watered down the message that there is almost nothing left, the bold raw claim of the season, that God is with us in the muck and mire, in strange places, in a hayrack in a stable, in the cries of mothers as a family flees across a border, desperate for safety. The stable is not a thin place if we are cynically deconstructing the story. It is a good story, true if not factual, and it is a thin place where heavenly hosts speak to shepherds in a field, keeping watch over their flocks by night.
What we need is more of the discipline of longing, more patient anxiety, not a sprint until the holidays are over, but a longing for God’s realm of love and justice.
We are meant to be on tenterhooks during this season, spiritual tenterhooks, and it is worth revisiting the origin of that word, for it does not just mean anxious waiting in the way Scout Finch and Harry Potter wait on tenterhooks in great works of fiction. As with most idioms, this one starts with a real thing, an actual object. Tenterhooks were tiny nails that stretched cloth for drying on a tenter or rack. And so with Advent, we are meant to be stretched, maybe even pierced like the one whose name we invoke during this season, the one we call Christ.
Life itself is for the time being, a liminal existence caught between our consciousness, that funhouse of mirrors, reflection upon reflection, some true and some distorted, and these bodies, which are finite, which fail. A Bodhisattva may be fully realized in the moment, but most of us are not Bodhisattvas. We want clear and definite and we do not have it. We want final answers. We lie to ourselves, anesthetize ourselves, create false gods, as if a God whose very name is “I am becoming†was ever going to be finite and fixed. We have a living God, and life is a perpetual state of not yet until there is not life, and we who call ourselves Christian dare to believe that even then, even when the electricity has left these fleshy shells, that there is still a not yet.
Hope is the not yet of the kingdom of love. If Advent does not make you a little queasy, a little spiritually anxious, you are doing it wrong, for it is a season of imagining what might be. It is a season when we tell ourselves that this God that is beyond our control, this living God, came to us in ways we did not expect.
Hope is always facing forward, never backwards, is always the might be, your personal might be and that of this strange thing we call existence, that we call being.
There is a reason traditionalists like me chafe at the mad dash of consumer capitalism, with back-to-school sales in July, halloween candy in September, and carols, carols, everywhere while there are still Pilgrims on the elementary school stage. Walt Disney World literally goes from Halloween parties to Christmas parties over night.
The birth of Jesus is not the end of the story. It is just one act in a story that is still being written. That the story will be very much alive in our hearts when we tell it again on December 24th, that Christ will come again that night in ways that are real to us, tells you that the story is not yet finished, that the kingdom of holy love in which we are all that God intended us to be, beings made in the image of a loving and creating mystery that speaks worlds into being, that story is not done, no matter how you understand the second coming.
That we are caught between is and might be should not be read, as is often the case, as diminishing the is. To be sure, some individual lives are suboptimal, and some situations intolerable. Existence itself is potentiality, of the unrealized, of the becoming.
Hope is possibility, it is believing. It is acting as if what might be will be, preparing ourselves and our world. For the time being things are what they are, but we work for the might-be, for the Creator is becoming and so is that mystery’s creation of which we are a part, a tiny and temporary spark, and oh so beautiful and loved.
I don’t know how Christianity became a dark and dreadful thing, corrupt and judgmental, focused on the is of institution, a vehicle for vile and poisonous hatred dressed up as righteousness. It is not that fake smile and pleasant appearance hiding a gaping and bloody maw. Christianity is meant to be a cliff-dive into the world, into the azure waters of life, a way of being, not a building and a bank account. Hope is seeing those azure waters, anticipating the thrill, the splash, the cool, and then daring to jump. Advent if that time when we stand on the edge, just for the time being.
You might not believe in the Second Coming in the same way as Paul, who expected trumpets to blare and the dead to rise, but I hope you believe that how things are for the time being is not how they should be. We are not all that we can be.
Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life.
Live love into the world. Embrace the time being, the anxiety, the not yet. Embrace a spiritual practice of longing and dissatisfaction. Embrace hope, that it gets better, for there is no room for hopelessness here. But don’t forget to roll up your sleeves and do what you can. Most of all, give them hope for the time being, hope when they are fleeing violence, hope when they are seeking employment, hope when they seek safety, hope when they seek love.
In the final chorus of his oratorio, Auden captures the following, the seeking, the loving, that is this season. “He is the truth,†the poet writes. “Seek him in the Kingdom of Anxiety.â€
This season, as every news report ratchets up our anxiety, may we know holy longing for God’s not yet. May we be shocked once more that God chooses to be with us. Let us cling to hope.
Amen.