Category Archives: Advent

Hope

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This week I wanted to spend time listening to Christmas music, wrapping Christmas gifts and baking Cranberry bread. I did these things, but along with so many others , I struggled, shattered by news of more violence against  innocent people , heartbreaking photos of grief-stricken families, terrified refugees, and the darkness of human hearts without hope and faith and love.

I have this pottery jar on my kitchen window sill.  It has been shaped and fired and given as a gift of love. In deeper, mysterious ways, Advent is expressed hope, shaped and fired and given. In the darkest of times, this hope remains.

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Let Advent Begin

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Photo by Pert Garraway                                    Night Blooming Cereus

My friend sent me cuttings of her night blooming Cereus plants.  She is a good gardener, and as her photo displays, she is an excellent photographer. But she would not be able to share this picture if  she were not also willing to sacrifice some sleep (they only bloom at night) as well as patiently wait for the swelling buds to open. I removed my cuttings from their mailing envelope and  put them into damp earth.  But I, too, must wait as they begin to root and grow and bloom.

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As I sit this morning, the first day of Advent, I think of this cycle and  am reminded of another gift, the wonder of  beginning again, of rooting and growing and waiting to experience the greatest mystery of all. .

Adult Advent Announcement

O Lord,
Let Advent begin again
In us,
Not merely in commercials;
For that first Christmas was not
Simply for children,
But for the
Wise and the strong.
It was
Crowded around that cradle,
With kings kneeling.
Speak to us
Who seek an adult seat this year.
Help us to realize,
As we fill stockings,
Christmas is mainly
For the old folks —
Bent backs
And tired eyes
Need relief and light
A little more.
No wonder
It was grown-ups
Who were the first
To notice
Such a star.

From If I Could Pray Again, by David Redding

Christmas Eve: Relationship

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The final figure has been hung in my Advent shadow box. In our Nativity scenes, the manger holds a baby. It is Christmas Eve, the time of laboring, receiving.  As waiting and expectancy end, the intense work so aptly named labor begins, the urgency of a baby’s entrance into our world gives way to embrace. With the birth of our granddaughter this year so fresh in my mind, I think of holding her minutes after birth.  So small and precious in my arms, so helpless, yet holdiing such power over my heart. In the hush of those moments, relationship locked and sealed forever. Relationship that began the moment I heard of her coming, that grew so sweetly when I saw ultrasound images, became one that will endure past physical life.

It is in that way Christ came to us. In that picture of receiving Him that we see God’s intention for relationship. We don’t just know he is coming . We welcome Him into our hearts.

 

IMG_1479This Nativity belongs to our youngest son. He first set it up when he was very small. As a boy, he built the little shed from scraps of wood shingles.  Now it sits in his own home, where his daughter holds the figures as she discovers her very first Christmas.

 

 

Welcome

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100_1877Selamat Datang

This bamboo nativity is one we got when we lived in Indonesia , along with the chest beneath it. If I titled today’s post Selamat Datang, many of you would not recognize the greeting, but if I smiled, spoke the words, and held out my arms, you would receive the message. Whether the creche is made of bamboo, or wood, or carved in stone, or simply made of sticks, we recognize its meaning because of the posture of the figures and their arrangement.  Christ’s coming broke down the walls that separate us, the barriers of difference and indifference, the stones in our path to God and to each other.  As we welcome Him, we learn a language that goes beyond speech.  We are offered a language of love.

Rekindling the Light

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Solstice has reminded us of the shortest day and the longest night. It is also a turning point. As dawn gilded the sky this morning days begin to grow again., Advent, with its 4 candles, is also seen as an observance of this rekindling

When I  light these candles, I reflect on the coming of the Light of Christ.  Can I do so with the intention of sharing this  light? .

What are the ways in which I can help make the world lighter? How do I bring light into the lives of those around me?

Listening

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Notes on Christmas Eve

 

 

A favorite children’s  Christmas song asks “Do you hear what I hear?”  These few days before Christmas day dawns, there is music everywhere – in the grocery store, piped into elevators, volume turned high for busy shoppers on the sidewalk. I love playing with a handbell choir at church and singing the songs of Christmas. Time around the piano with carols sung every year is one of our most special traditions, along with listening to all the Christmas classics. But I realize the danger in over familiarity.  I want to listen to the words and thrill to the message of this music.

God, help me slow down

Help me be still enough to listen

for hallelujahs and joy to the world

for Singer and Song

for words that turn

announcing your coming

offering your promise

Help me to pay attention and be astonished

Give me your Song to sing

Roses in Winter

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IMG_1346 On the South Texas Gulf coast,  Winter brings us more shirt sleeve days than those where we reach for jackets and gloves.  Recently, cool wet weather has spurred our roses to fresh bloom.  Winter roses have deeper, richer color than those earlier in the year.  Their fragrance seems sweeter and more compelling. Part of their brilliance is that they bloom in a stark and colorless garden. Leaves have browned and dropped.  Bare twiggy branches stand out against pewter skies. My Winter roses glow againstt this drab palette

Advent days begin with a canvas held down with layers of gray heaviness. With expectantcy we watch for Christmas coming again, and welcome the blooming in our hearts..Christmas comes again, richer, deeper, sweeter, more compelling.

Lo, how a Rose e’er blooming from tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse’s lineage coming, as men of old have sung.
It came, a floweret bright, amid the cold of winter,
When half spent was the night.

Isaiah ’twas foretold it, the Rose I have in mind;
Mary we behold it, the Virgin Mother kind.
To show God’s love aright, she bore to us a Savior,
When half spent was the night.

The shepherds heard the story proclaimed by angels bright,
How Christ, the Lord of glory was born on earth this night.
To Bethlehem they sped and in the manger they found Him,
As angel heralds said.

This Flower, whose fragrance tender with sweetness fills the air,
Dispels with glorious splendor the darkness everywhere;
True man, yet very God, from sin and death He saves us,
And lightens every load  ~ 15th century carol

And Yet…

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DECEMBER
Gary Johnson

A little girl is singing for the faithful to come ye
Joyful and triumphant, a song she loves,
And also the partridge in a pear tree
And the golden rings and the turtle doves.
In the dark streets, red lights and green and blue
Where the faithful live, some joyful, some troubled,
Enduring the cold and also the flu,
Taking the garbage out and keeping the sidewalk shoveled.
Not much triumph going on here—and yet
There is much we do not understand.
And my hopes and fears are met
In this small singer holding onto my hand.
Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark
And are there angels singing overhead? Hark.
~ Gary Johnson. Text as published online by The Writer’s Almanac (December 22, 2011).

Light for the Darkness

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Our hearts and homes are filled with anticipation of Christmas – music, the laughter of children, twinkling lights, and cookie baking. But there is no blocking the awareness of evil and horror in our world.  Media brings the terror of war and injustice of humans to even children right into our living room.  We may prefer to close our eyes and shut our ears to this threatening clamor, and may be tempted to think there has never been so much to fear at a Christmastime. But through the ages, there has been darkness and wrong – 100 years ago, in the trenches of WW I, the December of the attack on Pearl Harbor , and in the time before the first Nativity.

The poem below was written years ago by Madeleine L’Engle.  I believe it was one of the previously unpublished pieces included in the collection in Winter Song, published by L’Engle and her friend Luci Shaw in 1996, and was written some time before that, so at least 20 years ago.  But it sounds like she could have been writing after seeing this morning’s newscasts.

 

Into the Darkest Hour

It was a time like this,

War & tumult of war,

a horror in the air,

Hungry yawned the abyss –

and yet there came the star

and the child most wonderfully there.

 

It was time like this

of fear & lust for power

license & greed and blight –

and yet the Prince of bliss

came into the darkest hour

in quiet & silent light.

 

And in a time like this

how celebrate his birth

when all things fall apart?

Ah! wonderful it is

with no room on the earth

the stable is our heart.

~ Madeleine L’Engle, as quoted in Winter Song, Christmas Readings by Madeleine L’Enlge & Luci Shaw

 

Like Us

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Advent calls me to remember that Christ came to be one of us.  He came to be like us in all the imperfection of our messy lives.  Even his human family ancestry reflects this –  dotted with misfits and mistake- makers who also experienced grace, forgiveness and hope.

In Gail Godwin’s novel, Evensong,  a small town church in the Smoky Mountains is surprised when the local priest has a young teenage girl read the genealogy of Jesus recorded in Matthew  instead of the traditional Christmas story in Luke 2. The priest then quotes from an essay titled A Coming of Christ in Advent by Raymond Brown that says the genealogy list in Matthew 1 is “three minutes’ worth of tongue twisting names that  contain the essential theology of the Old and New Testaments for the whole Church, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant alike…If so much  powerful stuff can have been accomplished down through the millenia by..people who were such complex mixtures of sinner and saint, isn’t that a pretty hopeful testament to the likelihood that God is using us, with our individual flaws and gifts, in all manner of peculiar and unexpected ways?

“Who of us can say we’re not in the process of being used right now, this Advent, to fulfill some purpose whose grace and goodness would boggle our imagination if we could even begin to get our minds around it?”

Found in Evensong, b

 

 

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