A Spirituality of Awkwardness

Awkwardness is the space where interesting things might happen. It is the space where the hum and buzz of social convention is suddenly paused, where we are forced for a moment to contemplate the silence and creaturliness wherein – as apophatic theology points out – we might find the beginning of wisdom. What we feel when we feel awkwardness is the feeling of nakedness in the garden – we are exposed – and for a moment (or for some of us, many moments), the routine and business behind which we hide is stripped away. We are called upon to act, but there are no stage directions. We are called upon to speak, but we are not given a script. And so we stumble, and stammer, and try to gather the cover of business and routine and words more closely about our hearts. We fear we will be found out. We fear that when we are found out, we will not be loved.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately in relation to some of my favorite spiritual texts. Particularly, I’ve been thinking about it with regard to the gifts of grace, that is to say, all the gifts God has bestowed upon us, including our very selves. To think of being given so much by God is the most awkward thing of all, because what can one do? One can’t pay Him back. One can’t reserve a part of oneself. And it is absurd to even think of trying to explain and defend oneself before the very creator who made us. We are at a loss because we are the recipients of gifts. God has put us at the centre, and however hard we try, we can’t escape from the givenness of things. The giftness of the world focuses like a spotlight on each of us, and it is awkward, because it means we have been seen. And we don’t want to be seen – at least not in that way, the whole way, with nothing held back. We may want parts of us seen, but not the whole. And so we stand in awkwardness before God – given everything, even the very good works we do – and are able to give nothing in return. Our awkwardness is a sense of gratitude with nowhere to go. To give so much to us seems a radical miscalculation. And so we want to do something, and hide behind the something that we do.

What texts am I thinking of? Biblically, I am thinking of the parable of the two lost sons, the prodigal and the other – the prodigal experiences such awkwardness when he thinks of his gracious father, and then, when he is ashamed to imagine himself in that grace, imagines he will go back and work for him as a hired laborer. He will come back as a mere servant, and his servanthood will be his cover. It is a way not to deal with the awkwardness of things. Except where it impinges on his service, the business of a servant is his own, not his master’s. But a father is different. With the father, there is awkwardness.

Similarly, I am thinking of Martha in the kitchen. It may not be that she doesn’t feel the same awe Mary feels toward Christ – but perhaps she feels it secretly, so secretly she needs to hide it. She has been seen, spotted – and it is too much to bask in the awkward exposure of it. Better to do. Better to work. They will not notice you doing. The safest place is in the centre, working and facilitating, because no one notices the workers. But Christ does, because this is what Christ does – he makes things awkward.

These are the Biblical texts, but there are two others. One is Therese of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul. One of the central features of her story is a sense of grace achingly, intimately, embarrassingly profound – it is secret and awkward. Hence, Therese describes how she is “not going to give every detail. Some things lose their fragrance when opened to the air, and there are stirrings of the soul which cannot be put into words without destroying their delicacy.” This is Therese’s secret, awkward grace. For those scandalized by the radiant openness of this grace, she, like Moses, wears a veil, which is the typical reluctance of the saints (beginning with St. Paul) to talk about the grace – the gifts – that have been given them. And this veil is cut from the same fabric as that of the prodigal and Martha – speak less and distract them by what you do, and maybe people won’t notice the awkwardness of grace lying thick about your heart. But if they do, it doesn’t matter – the gift that is awkwardness – intimacy with Christ – is more than enough to make up for being found out.

The last text I want to talk about, and the one that inspired this post, is the last text in George Herbert’s Temple. “Love bade me welcome, but my soul drew back.” Why? Because “guilty of dust and sin” – the presence of real love is the presence of awkwardness. And when invited to sit and eat, the speaker does exactly that thing we have seen in the prodigal and Martha, the thing that becomes a beautiful translucent veil in the work of Therese of Lisieux – the attempt to hide in service. “My dear, then I will serve…” The line itself is ambiguous – it is unclear whether it is love or the speaker speaking – and this is as it should be. The voice of the lover and the beloved speak in unison, and indeed the thing the speaker turns to to cover his shame and awkwardness before grace becomes at once the grace itself. Even in service we can’t hide, because the service itself is grace – and grace, whose name is Christ, is patient enough to wait until we accept love’s invitation to eat the feast before us. Love and grace are awkward – and it is awkwardness that binds us to Christ.

Scary Ghost Stories and Tales of the Glories: Wishing You All a Christ-Haunted Christmas

Tags

Advent, Christmas, Flannery O'Connor, Holy Spirit, Tradition

This blog was begun out of Facebook posts I began writing during Advent. And so it is perhaps fitting that, as this time of year rolls around again, I should offer some thoughts on the season. As usual, they will be vexing and vexed, but here goes.

To begin, I don’t know who to be more frustrated with: those who reduce the season to commercialism and saccharine songs that are not even good by pagan standards, or those who allegedly want to put the Christ back in Christmas – by which they usually mean their favourite id(e)ol(ogy) which they have given the name Christ. If I were feeling uncharitable, I might make some sort of comment about it being impossible to put the Christ back in Christmas without putting the Mass back in Christmas, and you can decide for yourselves what I mean by that – at the very least, it means that it is certainly hard to understand Christ apart from the work of His bride through whom he has chosen to reveal himself. But I am not feeling much more uncharitable than normal, so I shall leave it at that for now.

What I do want to talk about though is how we navigate this odd holiday context in which Christ is in some way inescapable – for simply calling it “the holidays” or dating the world back to BCE rather than AD is just a manipulation of language; there is still the history behind the thing we are celebrating, and the uncomfortable fact that in secularity we are left with neither supernatural nor even basic pagan reasons for keeping the feast. In such a context, we are left with a vague feeling that we should have warm hearts and special generosity around this time because – well, because it’s Christmas.

Perhaps the most positive way we can put this is that the season is a mystery in the cultic sense – we don’t really know why or what we are doing when we celebrate Christmas, but we do so anyway because something in the mystery draws us; like Bryan Adams we simply feel that there’s “something about Christmas time,” and because of the difficulty of sustaining such a mystery religion in a modern, “progressive” world, we find ourselves longing for the infantile innocence of stupidity, which we excuse by mislabeling it as childlikeness, but nonetheless need if we are at all to maintain a state of confusion of which we are rightly fond as something preferable to pure secularity. In the immemorial words of Josh Groban, “you have everything you need, if you just believe” – and it is integral to the maintenance of this season that the fact of belief rather than the content of what is believed in is emphasized.

But if this is a problem for those who want to celebrate Christmas but have no idea why, it is equally a problem for Christians, who ought to know better than to simply lock themselves in a fortress-like dualism over against an ostensibly confused culture. We all know the rhetoric on the other side, the return to the “true meaning” of Christmas, whether this is understood as the iteration of Christ’s nativity narrative, a particular sobriety, the ousting of mammon, or the rather childish abolition of Santa Klaus and other Christmas mythopoeia. What always astounds me about this position is the dead certainty with which these people seem to know the “true meaning” of Christmas. Really? Is it so simple to grasp the fact of God becoming human and also remaining God? Have we really got a handle on this such that we can go about like busybodies correcting the imaginations of our friends and relatives? As you can see, I am happy about neither stance – confused secularism or dead certain faith with an emphasis on “dead.” So where can we find the answer? In ghosts, evidently.

Yes, quite seriously, I think we would do well to pay heed to Dickens and the spooky stories of twelfth night because they get at a fact about Christ’s incarnation that neither the secular sops nor the hard-nosed Chistian killjoys understand; what is primary about Christmas is that it is uncanny. Let me explain. In literary theory, when we talk about “the uncanny,” we are not talking about simple concrete gruesome horror, nor are we talking about something that cannot be known at all. No, what is uncanny exists in a realm that is related in a complicated way to our epistemologies – in negative terms, we might say it is uncertain, or in more positive terms, we might say it is a mystery. The uncanny disappears when certainty appears on either side, that is, when the ghost we are afraid of is debunked, or when it is put to rest within a solid and comprehensive metaphysics. In some Christmas traditions, this uncanniness is negative, as in the case of the poem “Old Christmas Morning,” but in Dickens, the uncanny ghost exists halfway between the worlds of marvel and terror, and the uncanniness of time – that is, the ungraspability – is shown in the persons of present, past, and future. What I want to suggest is that, far from being a distraction from the “true meaning” of Christmas, this tradition of uncanniness gestures in an analogical way to the central story of Christmas – the uncanniness of Christ’s incarnation. “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” speaks more truth than ought to be allowed such a schmaltzy song when it speaks of “scary ghost stories and tales of the glories,” for in a very real sense, the stories are of a piece. What ghosts are to our perception in a negative sense, the incarnation of Christ – inspired after all by a Holy Ghost – is in a positive sense. And we know this from the gospel of John.

For it is in John more than any other gospel that we get the fullest account of Christ’s birth. No, it is not the gospel we usually associate most closely with the Christmas story, given the omission of historical details. Yet there is a strong case to be made that John does in fact recount the Christmas story in the opening of his book – the difference is that he is recounting it from a metaphysical rather than merely human perspective. John, the eagle, looks into the sun of righteousness, and is dazzled. To say John points to the “true meaning of Christmas” here would be moot; rather, the logos has got hold of him and won’t let go. The fish need not draw attention to the whale.

But if this – what John is describing – can happen, then anything might happen. And this is the explanation of the uncanny stories that crop up at Christmas. Our imaginations are tantalized. In such a world, challenged as it is by the incarnation of God, men might come back from the dead. Flowers might bloom in the bleak of winter. Sinners might even learn to repent.

Aside from the more frightening instances of uncanniness, this also helps explains much of the needless frivolity, absurdity, and complete silliness of Christmas – which is perfectly justifiable on Christian grounds. In a world in which God can become incarnate, even the most foolish of things has potential to be folly for God. We do very silly things like sing songs of hope in the middle of a blizzard, or gather together with the people we argue most with – our family – and talk about peace on earth, good will toward men. Indeed, this overturn – this incarnation – may be enough even to redeem the most unredeemable of things. Even kitsch and schmaltz and jest might with the mages lay their gifts at the manger. This comes to pass, when a child is born.

What is clear then is this – that, when Christians seek to have a stranglehold on the “true meaning of Christmas,” they often miss the fact that its truest meaning is dazzling mystery, a mystery indeed patient enough to wait out their clumsy attempts to wield it like a club. Seculars and pagans get the bit about mystery – but without anywhere to point, it collapses into a dualism between ignorant sentimentalism and cynical despair. And it is with these problems in mind that I want to wish you all a Christ-haunted Christmas.

The description is Flannery O’Connor’s, asserting that if the US south is hardly Christ centered, it is certainly Christ-haunted. And it is precisely this perspective I propose in our approaches to Christmas. The season is saturated with Christian images, and imagery, and palimpsests, and erasures. Yet simply trying to go back to a “good old days” when people knew what Christmas was about is not the answer; nor is the answer steamrolling current society so we can rebuild a Christmas worthy of Christendom. No, what I suggest is a return to the mystery of incarnation, a mystery so powerful it does not even need to speak about itself all the time, but can in fact sustain imagination and the beauty of the world – from the highest instances of these to the silliest. All these instances point of course to the one Instance in the scansion of the inscape of creation, and we would do well to follow O’Conner in the realization that even a chaos and confusion of symbols and theologies – a thoroughly haunted labyrinth – is not a great obstacle to a God who calls order out of chaos and enters that order in the ambiguity known to us as flesh, and as the Ghost Who haunts us, moving as He lists.