Stephen Swanson

Stephen Swanson avoids the dangerous pitfalls of genericity (It’s a word he made up. Deal.) and refuses to look forward or backward.

Temptations & The New Liturgical Calendar for Writers

The fear of the blank page/screen holds a deal of sway in our daily lives. Like any common cultural experience, we’ve constructed systems to help deal with it. Shelves of books on how to write (some of which are quite useful) and myriads of places to lose ourselves in the writings of others provide “inspiration”. Websites serve us with distractions we HAVE to check (“But I HAVE to harvest my farm now, or it will rot.”). To be productive, even on a personal level, we need to break the cycle.

To answer to these fears, we’ve constructed templates to follow that take the mystery away, while celebrating the appearance of “mystery”. This “liturgical” calendar outlines a cycle of “worship” that guides our public conversations. Look at the cover stories on those magazines at the check-out, the commercials on TV, the “lead” stories on MSN or CNN, and the products in the “seasonal” aisles.

The Outline

August warns us of the impending school year by article upon article discussing “Ways to Help Your Child Succeed” or “The Area’s Best (and Worst) Schools”. The banner ads for tutoring companies increase, and phonics is shown in every break of Yo Gabba Gabba with magic wands that will read to your children for you. This merges into preparations for Halloween with the obvious decorations and candy displays, but there are also scary movies, books, and Yahoo tells me about “haunted” romantic trips. This morphs into Thanksgiving’s recipes, family advice, and subsequent beginnings of increased liquor ads and then transitions into the ubiquitous Christmas’ obvious place in the cultural milieu. Then, one cannot avoid the New Year’s calls of “to resolve or not to resolve”, weight loss, eHarmony pimping of perfect mates just waiting for you to log on, and beginnings of tax advice/warnings, which are followed my Valentine’s Day, etc, etc, etc…

Whose Calendar?

This is not a surprise. On one level, we believe it makes “sense”. The school year revolves around the periods where the kids are most needed on the farm. The taxes are due on April 15th, and the year starts in January, marking a 1-2 month period of mad scratching on misdated checks. However, in the contemporary moment, these periods are rather arbitrary. How many kids are still needed in the summers? Why not start the year in the middle of the summer? These are arbitrary and increasingly connected by someone telling us that we MUST think of X at Y time of year and conveniently have the perfect things for us to help ourselves.

Life in >140 Chars

For us, writers, we dangerously fall into paths of ease that function retrospectively or predicting the future. This is not a challenge or really effective. Go to any literary function, and views of the past and future abound. What we need to work on is the ability to write and produce in the now. What is our current plan? What do we say at this moment? While these are rooted in the past and future, our struggles, and thus our resolves, need to break out of the cycle and express the meaningful moment in more than 140 characters. Otherwise, we continue to allow the meanings of life to be predicated by the Snuggies and Chia Pets of the world. Did that planning into the “10 Perfect Drinks for your New Year’s” article really make your New Year’s Eve?

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Stephen Swanson teaches as an assistant professor of English at McLennan Community College. Aside from guiding students through the pitfalls of college writing and literature, he spends most of his time trying to remain reasonably aware of popular culture, cooking, and enjoying time with his wife and son. He holds degrees in Communications, Film, and Media and American Culture Studies from Calvin College, Central Michigan University, and Bowling Green State University, respectively. In addition to editing a collection, Battleground States: Scholarship in Contemporary America, he has forthcoming projects on Johnny Cash and depiction of ethics in contemporary film noir.

Kristin Noblin

Wednesday marked the Christian Feast of Epiphany, or the time when the wise men visited the baby Jesus.  Yes, it’s true: most nativities lie.  According to Scripture, Mary, Joseph, and the baby were long gone from the manger by the time the magi showed up on the scene, and I’m sure the shepherds were too.  I didn’t really learn that the magi were still on their way when Jesus was born–at least, not in a way that stuck–until either high school or college, and I remember being disappointed.  I’m not entirely sure why: perhaps because it seemed weird that the Christmas story extended outside of December, perhaps it was because of the misleading nativities, perhaps it was sadness for the magi who missed the big event and arrived after the fact.

Yet now I find it reassuring that the story continues beyond the decorations coming down, vacations ending, routines resuming.  Epiphany serves as an important reminder that the coming of Christ is about both waiting and movement.  While Israel waited for the Messiah and a teenager waited for contractions, the magi were still on their way, still seeking, still anticipating wonder.  It is perhaps the core of the gospel–God became flesh and walked among us–and we are called to wait, to journey, to worship, which seems so fitting for those of us living in this tension where Christ has already and not yet come.  As a friend aptly tweeted recently, “Words for Epiphany: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”  What are you journeying toward this new year?  Are you paying attention along the way?

I find that poetry helps remind me to pay attention to all that is around me and all that is within me.  I first read this poem on a friend’s blog last year and stumbled upon it again today.

The Journey of the Magi

“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley.
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

–T. S. Eliot

Stephen Swanson

Stephen Swanson moves on to something nicer for the holidays…the holidays! After a recent conversation group at church about the meanings and importance of the Advent season, Stephen tries to piece together something from the scraps of wrapping paper, tinsel, and fallen pine needles.

We are Filled…Literally

I’ve always enjoyed the period from Thanksgiving to New Years. Not only is the weather changing and the semester is winding down, but we enter into food season where the kitchen is filled with enticing smells every week, if not every day. There’s the prep for Thanksgiving, which leads to leftovers, which leads to stock made from leftovers, which leads to soups made from the stock from the leftovers, and this progresses on to cookies, prep for Christmas when the cycle continues, just in time for New Years, football, and Chinese New Years…mmmmm…

How Unfilling?

Of course this plenty has its negative side, gluttony of food and stuffs. In addition to a time of food, family, and friends, it is the time when advertisers tell us that we need to fill ourselves with HD TVs, Nintendo DS’s, plastic toys, and salad shooters. We all know, intellectually, that these things do not feed us through these cold months. We know that we should not spend THAT much, “But, it’s Chrismas,” right?

The 24-hour cable news machine also tells us of our emptiness, as it tries to fill its own. The TVs at school, tuned to Headline News, consistently tell all passersby how much they need to argue about the name of the season, “Holidays” v. “Christmas,” about how one should or should not spend, “Organic” v “Local”/“Wal-Mart” v “Ma & Pa”/etc., and about what to do when you realize you’ve ended up overdoing it, debt consolidation/gold/ diets/gyms/ Gold’s Gyms & Diets.

I go to church and hear the same passages from Luke, see the cute kids in bathrobes, listen to the handbells, and I love those familiar rituals, but something leaves me unfulfilled. It is not that we need more “Christ in Christmas” or need to acknowledge “The Reason for the Season”. It is so much more simple and complex than that.

“Filling” is Filling

Rather, I want people to think outside of the platitudes and simple expressions of faith and fulfillment. What is so energizing and exciting, to me, about the food part of the seasons from late November and into February is not the consumption but rather the “advent”.

I don’t mean the candles in the wreath or the little doors with candies behind them. I seek the “arrival that has been awaited” that advent really means. It is in the preparation and that magical instant at the door when you invite the visitors in to your warmth, smells, and company: your hospitality. No matter your religion or spirituality, the meaning behind this time of year touches the commonalities within all of us to be both host and hosted and gifter and giftee.

The connection between “love”, “joy”, “peace”, and “hope” of advent does surround the “Christ” candle in my tradition, but that messiah also points to the duality at the center of both Christianity and humanity, more broadly: that we are all both citizens and strangers and need connection to remember the transcendent power of hope in bringing peace and joy through love.

And so I ask that you all consider what you are feeding yourself and others, and I ask that you look for the fulfillment of the self through the other.

Also…learn to make your own stock. It’s not that hard and is soo tasty.

Travis Griffith

Christmas has always been my all-time favorite part of the year.

Well, maybe it’s in a tie with Halloween. And hot summer days on the lake. Regardless, I love Christmas because of the magic it creates and for the love I feel on Christmas Day and the eve before.

I love Christmas because of childhood memories of waking up at 3 a.m. and excitedly but cautiously making my way towards the Christmas tree to see if Santa had come yet. I was never disappointed, and the magical feeling of seeing a new toy bathed in the soft glow of the tree’s light has never left me. I call it the Christmas Feeling, but it’s a feeling that still crops up, occasionally, year-round.

As sacrilegious as it may seem to say this, Christmas for me isn’t about the birth of Christ, but about love, generosity, thankfulness and family. All things Christ represents, I suppose, but I reject the story of Jesus’ birth happening in a manger on Dec. 25.

Not long ago a friend saw some of my writing here about my search for spirituality and asked me questions about what I believe. She’s a devout Christian and a giving, loving human. She asked if I had ever considered Christianity and then invited me to her church.

I respectfully declined.

The truth is, I have considered Christianity very carefully and I appreciate many of the values it teaches (and loathe others). What I cannot accept are the stories behind the religion; Christmas being one of them.

I try to keep an open and respectful eye on all of humanity. Humans have been on Earth much longer than 2,000 years and through it all, humanity has one constant: a desire for the spiritual. It seems people today don’t give credit to the advances and traditions of ancient people. December 25th and the winter solstice have been important as early as 4500 BC; acknowledged in everything from ancient Ireland’s Newgrange burial chamber, Babylon’s Isis and Osiris myths, the Roman’s Festival of the Birth of the Unconquered Sun, and the modern day story of Christ’s birth.

When Roman Emperor Constantine declared Christianity the official religion in 350, other forms of worshiping were banned. Rather than changing old traditions, Pope Julius I declared Dec. 25 Christ’s birthday.

My intent here isn’t to persuade people away from Jesus’ story. I believe Christ was a real person, an heir of God, who’s purpose was to spread the message of love. If your truth lies in Christianity, revel in it!

During the holiday season, it’s the Christmas Feeling that I celebrate though, along with many thousands of years of humanity’s desire to celebrate our planet, our families and the love that holds us all together.

Merry Christmas and Peace on Earth, friends.

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Travis Griffith, who recently left behind the corporate marketing world, choosing family and writing in lieu of “a comfortable life” financially, is a former atheist trying to define what leading a spiritual life really means. His children’s book, Your Father Forever, published in 2005 by Illumination Arts Publishing Company, Inc. captures only a fraction of his passion for fatherhood.