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Are you ready for Christmas? During the season of Advent – which annually begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas and leads up to December 25 – followers of Jesus traditionally look for ways to prepare themselves for the coming of God’s own Son into the world. Throughout December we’ll ponder ways that we can ready ourselves to receive Jesus, once again, into our own hearts.
TheFew, the Brave, the Swirled!
That’s the unofficial motto of a group you almost certainly don’t want to belong to.
It’s the Old Sow Whirlpool Survivors’ Association, a loose gathering of exceedingly fortunate individuals who have had a close encounter with the largest watery vortex in North America and lived to tell about it.
The Old Sow appears from time to time in Passamaquoddy Bay between Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick.
Approximately 40 billion cubic feet of water rushes into the Bay twice every 24 hours with the rising tide. There it mingles with countercurrents from the St. Croix River to the north.
Beneath the surface is a peculiar V-shaped trench near Deer Island Point, 400 feet deep to the southwest and 327 feet deep to the northwest. An undersea mountain, rising 281 feet, bisects the trench. That’s what creates the drama.
The water that surges into the bay has to make a sharp right turn around Deer Island Point, where it slams into the undersea mountain. If the tides are running high, the winds are blowing strong, and the St. Croix River is gushing, a terrifying “hole” suddenly appears in the bay.
The Old Sow is so named because the sucking, swirling vortex can sound like the grunting of a pig. Smaller whirlpools (“piglets”) occasionally materialize in the same area.
In the pre-motorized era, boats that wandered into the bay at the wrong moment risked catastrophe. The whirlpool is known to have claimed dozens of lives.
Even today a small craft with an outboard motor may not be able to overcome the tremendous currents of the maw. Some boaters “circle the drain” for hours – not losing ground, but not gaining any, either – until they can be rescued.
The Old Sow Whirlpool Survivors’ Association provides a handsome certificate (“suitable for framing,” according to their website) to anyone who has meandered into the clutches of the Old Sow and lived to tell about it.
All things considered, this might not represent the greatest honor of one’s life.
The OSWSA is essentially a group of people who are openly acknowledging that they ended up at the wrong place at the wrong time, probably because they were careless or reckless. At the end of the day they’re lucky simply to be alive.
When you think about it, that sounds a lot like the church.
A gathering of Jesus’ disciples is essentially a Losers Club. It’s the association of people who are openly acknowledging they are spiritually sick and are going to need help every day of their lives.
In that regard, the spirit of Christmas – when understood from a biblical perspective – is not triumphant. It is not bombastic. The best word to describe God’s arrival as a human being is humble. There are no headlines, no fanfares, no press releases.
Which can only mean that the best way for us to approach Christmas is in a spirit of quietness and humility – to take to heart that our need of the Lord remains so great that he had to become a baby whose diapers needed to be changed every few hours.
It’s not hard to find congregations, however, that would prefer to go a different way.
Why not masquerade as a Winners Club? Or maybe the Church with All the Right Answers. Or perhaps the We’ve Got it All Together Association. Why not present smiling, respectable, nicely dressed people who appear to have superior spiritual insight?
It’s clear, however, that Jesus’ vision for the church isn’t a museum to display marble statues of completed saints. Jesus’ vision is more like an ER that comes alongside wounded people who can’t stop the bleeding.
And that gives people hope.
Perhaps the church should rebrand itself as the Spiritual Survivors’ Association.
Jesus’ followers, after all, have something important in common with those who have experienced the Old Sow and lived to tell the story.
At the end of the day, the one thing we know for sure is that we’re just blessed to be spiritually alive.