January 13 reflection

One of the simple pleasures of January that I enjoy begins on Monday the 14th.  It is the Australian Open.  Beyond my love of tennis--and I LOVE tennis and the amazing athletes who create artistry in motion with simply a ball and racquet and the confines of baselines and alley lines--the "thing" that gets me is watching players sweating under the sweltering heat of Australia's summer, while I stoke the fire with another log in Connecticut's northern hemisphere.

The juxtaposition of the southern and northern hemisphere's opposing seasons is an easy reminder of how vast the globe is.  It's one more opportunity to recognize the great mystery of what one of the Eucharistic prayers expresses as this fragile earth, our island home.
And this global climate flip-flop is, well, just COOL!  It reminds us, again, of how very small and inconsequential we are.  Which, I hope, is not interpreted in a pejorative way.  I actually think that an awareness of smallness and inconsequentiality is, actually, helpful, important, or, as Proverbs 9.10 would proffer, "the beginning of wisdom ."

However, global awareness, coolness, or simply the recognition of humanity's place in this--to quote John Prine--big old goofy world is really not what, ultimately, attracts me to the juxtaposition of hemispheres.  What I love is the ongoing challenge to our assumptions that must be made when we become aware of the larger world, and the possibility of thinking--and hopefully acting--in ways that are not simply in lockstep with our surroundings or what we have known but nimble enough to see another way, a different way, a way, nonetheless, that is just as good or true or apt as what we have done or will continue to do.

Mainly, I think about Christmas.  In the northern hemisphere, it makes complete sense to hold Christmas at the point in the calendar--and the reality of the world around us--when we are locked in the darkest time of the year.  In this context, it is easy to catch the resonances of the light returning, light flooding the darkness and driving it away, and light filling and warming our hearts.  Our hemispherical ontology is a direct analog to what we hope and trust occurs in God coming in Christ:  the light is the light of the world. . . the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.

However, if you live in the southern hemisphere, you observe Christmas at the point in time when your surroundings are just the opposite.  The weather is balmy.  You have just observed the longest day of light in the year.  And now you begin the long and steady slog through summer to the darkest day on JUNE 21!

Some recognize this situation as hemispherical colonization:  the north imposing its will on the south.  Others, meanwhile, respond with the classic, "Get a life."  There are more important things to consider.  Still others will ask in what ways the context of summer in the southern hemisphere might be able to express the fullness of Christmas' imagery and symbolism.  (There is no doubt that the eternal SUN is shining as brightly and hotly as it will all year at this time, and one can make an easy connection of how brightly and hotly the eternal SON shines in our lives.)

Yet, I often wonder what would happen if we, as the global church, allowed communities in their various contexts to worship and observe the festivals at the times when they resonated the most?  Why do we need to be on the same schedule?  Why do we pretend that we observe in the same way?  Why do we think that there is ONE way of believing or acting or praying or worshiping that is right? 

Again, the vastness of the globe expressed in the hemispherical seasonal dichotomy is a helpful reminder that there is soooo much diversity in the world, soooo much variety, soooo much infinitude of thinking, being, expressing, desire, enjoyment, and soooo much more.  Why do we need to confine everything?  Demand conformity?  Rather than sacrilege and heresy, could even the observance of major festivals in our tradition at different times in the calendar be a way of marking off the multifaceted world which God has created and the manifold ways that God comes to us not least of which is because of the particular uniqueness that we possess?

Just a thought.  I'll mull it over a bit more as the Australian Open plays out. . .

Blessings,

Mark