Saturday, December 21, 2013

Christmas letter 2013



Dear beloved friends and family:
Gaudate Sunday. Third Sunday of Advent, 2013. (Designated a day for joy). The mornings are graced long before dawn with orange and green across the valley below my house; the ground is often frosty and hard this cold dry year. It sings: The dawn from on high shall rise in our hearts. So calls St Luke. This afternoon I sit in a cozy East-side coffee shop, enjoying my first coffee in a few weeks, having under-taken the switch, more or less, to the healthier but less edgy world of green tea. Mellow Portlanders are chatting quietly, studying, checking their smart phones, sipping lattes. It’s a nice day, with joggers and cyclists cruising past the window. I should be out there too but my motivation is low today, a product I guess of a long year, dark mornings, and short days. Across the street is the car I leased last month after exactly 30 months without a car: Ford CMAX, plug-in electric hybrid, rated at 110 miles per gallon equivalent (MPGe) including the electricity to charge it and the gas it rarely uses. One goal when I left the car ownership world was to return as an early- adopter of next generation solutions. This feels like partial realization; small but vivid hope.
News: Mandela died last week. His legacy, the peaceful transition of South African from apartheid to democracy, ranks as one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century, another sign of hope, however faltering that nation’s current journey. He lived fearlessly, they say, and said, no matter how bright or dark the road, I am the captain of my soul. Rousing words, for a people, all of us, in need of rousing. The new Catholic prelate, Pope Francis I, has inspired more recently. This fall he issued an encyclical that I commend to you. “The Christian life is a life of joy!” This resonates, all the way to the bones. “Joy is the surest sign of God’s presence,” recalls my mother quoting an earlier philosopher. I can go with that! In the new Pope’s compassion: more hope for the Catholic world than in my lifetime. Suddenly the Gospel, gripping and uncomfortable, a people awakened by renewed desire for the true, among us. I sit up. Something is new.
Here in Portland, though, most people, although curious about the new Pope, aren’t much interested in religion. It has a bad name. If there is religion here, it entails a sincere search for mindfulness, for integrating body and mind (a gluten free or at least organic diet), staying fit and exercising regularly, and on a lighter note, serious attendance at the local pro soccer games! These are not bad things. I’ve tried my best to participate. I’m mindful (occasionally), low on gluten (mostly), organic (strictly), fit (sort of), and I’ve been to a soccer game (okay, once, but that counts)! Being mindful is not child’s play. I become aware of my breath, each breath a miracle, a gift I cannot control, which one day will all at once stop for good; of the whispered joy bending low over the earth; of agony and pain, all around; a neighbor with a suicidal child; a friend suffering a divorce; a homeless man we knew lying dead tonight on the sidewalk; entire nations in despair. It weighs. The television beckons escape. Yet I become aware of massive interconnection; nothing I do is done alone; and relentless breath of life and transformation, of grace and what I choose to call redemption (despite its loaded connotations here in secular Portland), and the human yearning for holiness, for truth, for the good, which seems to be everywhere, quietly, never ending, always fresh, always approaching, ever inviting. Jesus said, “if you hunger and thirst for holiness, your desire will be granted, good measure, flowing over.” I see that hunger all over if by different names, and everywhere answered. Freedom, real freedom, beckons us all. So I am told. That’s what salvation is to me. From Luke: “he will come to his people and set them free.” Clear enough. May we, you, us, then, be free indeed: free from fear, from oppression, from hunger; free to love, to live the life we were born to live.
Life for me of late, particularly this Advent, has felt like a kind of affirmation of vocation. Last week we had a cold snap—lows in the teens, high’s in the 20’s. Too cold to live on the street. We opened the church to provide shelter after hours. I took my turn covering the shifts. It was a path of joy, surprising yet real. Joy amid despair. Inspiration amid darkness. Because those homeless men and women and children on the floor, in all their neediness and confusion, stress and rage, also showed flashes of bravery, generosity, endurance, and honesty that inspire. My friends, doing more than me to serve, created community around it all. Yet I could see everyone, homeless guests, staff, helpers and volunteers, growing weary with the long days of record cold. That same week I took my first turn at a board meeting of the Oregon Environmental Council, the leading environmental organization in Oregon, headquartered in Portland. We’re working on getting carbon pricing in Oregon, as part of a west coast coalition of California (which has cap and trade already), Oregon, Washington (both working on a carbon tax), and British Columbia (which has a working carbon tax in place already). Being in the fight to slow down carbon pollution and slow global warming feels, well, good. I don’t know why but I can’t get it out of my mind. So it’s a relief and a joy to me to participate, even in a seemingly hopeless battle (after all, our opponents, the carbon fuel industries, have something like 50 TrILLION dollars in assets in the ground, and money does talk loudly!). Being in a position to help shape the strategy of this key organization is another dream come true, a dream I’ve had for a few years. Meantime the “work-work”, the science, the academics, stays alive. We are making discoveries! Energy is building.  A sense, a vivid sense, that it’s not nearly done. The more I learn, the more I know that I do not know. Then as soon as I think I don’t know anything, I find I have some knowledge to share all the same! Does that knowledge really come from me, or am I merely a vessel it passes through?
I’ll mention two travel highlights, seen in the pictures. In August, some days of backpacking in the Sisters Wilderness in Central Oregon. Somehow, after a year of asthma and physical struggle, the mountains brought me boundless energy again, climbing high on those uninhabited ridges in happiness, sleeping under the thickest blanket of stars you could ever imagine, and Storm (my dog), at 8 years old, keeping up just fine. Why is happiness so simple, joy so obvious, at a high mountain lake? Yet it is. This must be God’s home. (I get asked here, how can you believe in God? Yet something keeps it all going; something enlivens the entire universe and turns calculus functions into fire; something burns with joy and love in our hearts and unites us in solidarity; we don’t know what it is, or how. I guess we call that God for lack of a better word. J). The last picture shows me, Storm, and my hiking buddy Tom. The second was a trip to Europe, in which I was able to meet my sister and my aunt in Italy. We shared a day in Rome, three days in Assisi, and side trips to Sienna and Florence. The first picture shows me standing in front of the Basilica of St Francis. The return to Assisi, six years after my pivotal trip there in which I made the decision to move to Oregon, was meaningful. If there was a message from the Saints to be had there, from Chiara (Clare) and Francesco (Francis) it was simply: this way is a way of happiness! So it resonates, down through the weeks and years and centuries, contrary to every message of despair that bombards our minds, hearts, eyes, and senses around us, beckoning us. A small smile crosses my face and flows in my blood at that.
Once again this year and this season I must affirm all of you, signs of hope and courage to me. Each of you in some way small or large, whether in your recent word or deed or in my memory of you, has lifted me up and helped me better live. You have done the same for others—your friends, your lover, your children, your siblings, even when you did not know it, even when you thought you failed in much. Keep on living, find joy, be generous, forgive, try again. Thank you for your generosity to me.

Peace in your heart, and all blessings always!! Joel Nigg, Advent, 2013
8100 SW 6th Ave Portland 97219 jtnmail99@gmail.com 503-953-3114