...held close in her mother's embrace

Name, my heart is not racing, 
my gaze doesn't search the stars;
my mind doesn't dwell on 
what will always elude me.
Instead, my soul is silent and still, 
content as a weaned child held close 
in her mother's embrace.
---Psalm 131:1-2 (para. laca)

When I nursed my babies, there was a closeness between us, a symbiosis, that is like nothing I have ever shared with any other person. These tiny beings grew in me for months, dependent on my body for every bit of life. Then, the sudden violence of separation. From the warmth and closeness of the womb, shadowy and quiet, to the cold and glare of real life. From that moment of birth, of separation, when somehow one being becomes two people, the search begins. The unquenchable thirst --- for nourishment, yes, but for more. When a babe snuggled into me, it was also in search of that warm, dark place that had been home for so long. Every nerve, every sinew was laser-focused on latching on and settling in, drinking urgently, as if life depended on it. Because life depended on it.

And there were times when I was weary of it. The inconvenience of entertaining a toddler while nursing a baby, all balanced on a toilet in a dirty bathroom stall at McDonald's. The messiness of nursing. The on-call-ness of it. The soreness of it. The way brushing my baby's cheek could set off the craned neck of a Pavlovian response, feeding time or no. The Pavlovian response of my body to the sound of my own baby's cries. There's a weariness about it, no doubt.

But in a little while, or a lot, you and your baby find, together, that the time has come for moving on, to a sippy cup with a whale on it, or a cow, or to a bowl of strained peaches or rice cereal. Nursing, when it happens, loses the frantic searching quality of early infancy, and it is time. Your babe is not a babe, but a child, weaned.

And your child still comes to you in the shadows, nestles into you, head tucked into the space under your chin. You still wrap your arms around your child, you breathe together, you rock back and forth. There is no more frantic striving, none of the urgent needing of infancy. In its place, there is stillness. There is silence. There is contentment.

Hi Mom! Send Bitcoin!

Turn from evil and do good.
Seek peace and pursue it.
---Psalm 34:14

On Saturday our little town was visited by a few (hundred thousand) extra people. There was a pretty big football contest going on, and a show called Gameday broadcast from town on the morning of. During Gameday, folks endeavor to have their creative signs captured on camera and spread famously across the world for a few seconds. My son Sam told me a story he had heard about one college student's sign.
The sign was a riff on the familiar 'Hi Mom! Send $' scrawled by college students across the decades on signs, letters, and telegrams from State U to Hometown USA. This one, however, was for a new, digital age. This sign said, 'Hi Mom! Send ---' then had a symbol that looked like a combination of an upper-case B and a dollar sign, followed by a black and white jumble. The symbol was for Bitcoin, an "open source peer-to-peer electronic money and payment network." It is a traded commodity. The jumble was a QR code, which can be read and translated by smart phones. When folks saw the fun -looking sign, they scanned the code into their phones on a lark --- and this is where the magic began. Apparently the young man has so far made $24,000 in Bitcoin from the folk who scanned his QR code during the few seconds of air time his sign received during ESPN's Gameday broadcast.
He knew what he wanted --- and he went out and sought it. In the verse from the Psalm today, we are told to seek peace, to pursue it. We all dream of peace, visualize it, sing about it, long for it. And those are all important pursuits. But the time comes when chasing after peace is the noble pursuit. Here at Advent, we often extol the virtue of waiting. And a wise person said 'Good things come to those who wait.' But in our world filled with turmoil, mistrust, and violence, peace must be sought and pursued.
Peace must be made.
Don't wait for your Bitcoin to fall out of the sky. Get out your Sharpie and make your sign. Gameday's coming...


...so here we stand, whoever we are,
bathed in the light of a star...