I've been thinking about stories that I don't like.

 

I grew up in the Unitarian Universalist (UU) tradition. The congregation my family attended during most of my childhood was a beautiful, vibrant, active, humanist congregation. In those days, the primary goal of humanist UU children's religious education was to provide ethical teachings while introducing us to an array of world religious traditions.

 

This is a goal that lends itself to breadth. We covered a large number of stories, most of which we only revisited once or twice, all at a playful, flirting, introductory level. When we heard Jesus' birth story, we also heard the birth stories of the Buddha and Confucius. Three stories in one day! I never had to spend time with a story I didn't like.

 

It wasn't until I was a young adult and discovered Unitarian Universalist Christianity that I forced myself to spend extended amounts of time immersed in stories that didn't sit well with me. Even then, armed with historical-critical approaches to the bible seeded in 19th century German biblical scholarship and whole-heartedly embraced by early American Unitarians and Universalists, I was able to write-off entire stories as simple products of their time.

 

Here is news from seminary in the fall of 2016: the ugliest, hardest to swallow, and most unlikeable stories of the bible are still there. There are still "texts of terror," as feminist biblical scholar Phyllis Trible calls them, and there are still vivid descriptions of a God who doesn't liberate the oppressed, as womanist theologian Delores Williams argues.

 

A combination of the comparative religions approach of my childhood and the historical-critical approach of my young adulthood has proven useful in the scholarship I am asked to do in seminary. I have found during the length of my adulthood, however, that it does not do much for a deep and meaningful spiritual life. For that, I have to reduce breadth a bit in the interest of depth.

 

It has been my experience that to confront their complexity and layers of meaning, I need to stick with stories I don't like, to wrestle them long enough to allow them to do something inside of my heart.

 

Now here we are in the season of advent, the time when we prepare to encounter the Christmas story. This story is, in many ways, very likeable. It surely makes cute pageants. Of course, this doesn't mean advent is an easy time of year. For various reasons, many of us approach Christmas with hearts full of grief, dread, resentment, fear, exhaustion, apathy, or disinterest. But few of us mind the Christmas story itself. Though we feel hopeless in this moment, we aren't hostile to hope. Many of us, on some level, desire to receive the Christmas story with the eagerness of children.

 

How do we go deep with a story that has become so familiar and that is so generally likeable? If a story is easy to swallow, is its meaning lost on us or has its meaning already become such a part of us that it dwells in us and requires nothing more of us? How do we go deep with a story that we can watch in a pageant, year after year, without feeling the need to wrestle? This is spiritual work that beckons me this advent.

 

Below are a few of the tools I have been practicing at seminary that I will bring to the advent season as I prepare to encounter the birth story of Jesus, the story most familiar to me out of all the bible.

 

First, I will be reading the story as written in Matthew, Luke, and John (the story is not found in Mark, but I will be consulting Mark too). They are very different accounts, in a number of ways, and I believe I am meant to glean something from that. Second, I will be reflecting on what I have read (my reflections will happen in conversations with a couple friends, but others might prefer to make art, journal, dance, sit in silence, make music, write a letter, or reflect in some other way):

 

 

Third, I will pray, and I welcome you to join me.

 

Peace in this season and in these difficult days,

and Warmly in Faith,

Sierra-Marie