Patience

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100_1599In the basket of stones I keep on our back porch is a stone with the word “patience” on it.  I use these stones at times to help me pray, and I often need to pick up patience!  If the commercialization of Christmas cannot be ignored, it may take a great deal of patience to avoid jumping before Thanksgiving  into extravagant celebration of Christmas without waiting and working through the days of Advent. “Waiting for Christmas is like waiting for a star to fall. We know it will come, streaking across our lives with promised Light, but we can grow weary from the Advent strain of waiting.”

Can I take time to lean into the meaning of Christ’s coming?  Can I put down my lists of things to do, and simply be?  Waiting is hard. I need patience. I want to anticipate the fullness of the coming of Christ. Let me not hurry Christmas.

 

May I have a deep, calm resistance against the riptide of the season’s hurry.

While swell upon swell of Christmas laps at the very edge of our lives,

you call me to an Advent way of living;

deep calling to deep,

love bearing love,

Word becoming flesh,

Slow, labored, beloved Patience,

come, teach me to trust in Advent’s buoyancy;

suspend me, outstretched,for  the coming of Christ.     Amen

adapted from   Simply Wait, Cultivating Stillness in the Advent Season, by Pamela Hawkins

 

 

 

An Ucertain World

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y001My granddaughter holds out a heart made by my friend – a symbol of the open spirit and tender heart of both little girl and woman. Advent gives a time to recognize perilous times without closing ourselves to the ways God can help us to live and work in the certainty of His provision for us.

The Advent story begins with darkness and God’s silence and waiting. It begins before the angel’s visit, a pregnant girl,  the gathering of those in the manger scenes,, when there was a longing for the message that would unfold. It began in an uncertain, unsettled world. I looked through a journal I kept in 2012 recently and was reminded of months of surgeries for Joe, and the ways in which we crossed the threshold of that year, stepping into a path that we did not yet see clearly, waiting for Light for the next step, and Light to reflect to each other. Over and over, I read the notes I made that showed how that happened.  This looking back and telling the story is what Advent means – a story of a time of waiting through days that hold pain and grief, but knowing underneath all is the surety of God’s presence..

 

O God, help me live and work with certainty in an uncertain world. Help me to take the next step even if I do not yet see my way clear, trusting your Light for the way.. Help me to hold out my heart,

 

 

Advent Flames

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Another way of counting Advent days is the use of an Advent wreath with a candle to light and add each Sunday during Advent. For our Advent candles at home, we do not use the same arrangement every year, and often do not use traditional colors (3 purple, 1 pink, and a white candle for the center candle, the Christ candle).  I use the same candles from the year before when possible.  Here, the first candle, lit last Sunday, burns brightly – the candle of Hope. Of course the candles lit in the beginning burn down the furthest, If all the candles were new, all of them would be the same height in the beginning. This candle may be the tallest now, but will wind up being the shortest in the last week of Advent.

I recently learned about a little known Advent tradition of using an Advent log, instead of a wreath.  It has a candle hole for each day of Advent, plus one for Christmas day.   Here is a poem  that refers to this lovely tradition:

 

Prayer at the Advent Log

The small lights steady

against the dark

Your flame is touching ours.

Today is the fifth day.

It is a safe fire,

the candles still tall

against the brittle wood

of the birch, the air

damp and chill.

But the days will draw us

inexorably toward

Your celebration.

And again we’ll stand

in the crackling air,

the first day’s flames

licking the log

with their shortened lives,

the length of it threatened

by Your fire,

Your love dazzling our eyes,

And O Christ,

Your love

searing our nakedness.

~Jean Janzen as quoted in A Widening Light, edited by Luci Shaw.

 

 

 

Divine Interruption

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One of the ways our family walks the Advent path is with an Advent calendar. This is not like a desk calendar with pages.  We have a number of different ways of counting the days.  One of the first we used when our boys were very small was by reading a story from a Little Golden Book every night. The book came with its own cardboard triptych, a fold out replica of Bethlehem, with shuttered windows that could be opened to reveal a symbol inside. Our children loved opening the tiny windows and first listening, then reading the part of the story the symbol represented.  One of our sons and his wife gave us one that is a box, a stack of small drawers that can be opened each day.

Today is the 4th day of Advent, and this is the Advent “keeper” or calendar I used this morning during my quiet time. It is a little A frame shape box with hinged sides that fold shut and latch.  There are tiny hooks for small figures to attach representing a different character in the nativity story for each day.  When I look at these 4 figures, it seems they are all shepherds, young shepherd girls and boys. As I scattered the remaining figures, thinking of the days ahead, I thought how these had lives that were tremendously interrupted by the story of Christ’s coming – the shepherds, most certainly Mary and Joseph, and even the animals who shared their stall (there are cows and sheep to hang on hooks, too) – all were divinely interrupted and all had lives were changed forever in ways they previously could never have imagined..I wonder if I am open to such interruption, to being unsettled..  Dietrich Bonhoeffer said “We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.”  I

“Lord, the calendar calls for Christmas.  We have traveled this way before.During this Advent season we would see what we have never seen before, accept what we have refused to think, and hear what we understand. Be with us in our goings that we may meet you in your coming…”  ~  The Unsettling Season, by Donald J. Shelby

 

Hope

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IMG_1336My young granddaughters and I made this painting project together last week. As I laid out cardboard under a blank canvas and handed out a tube of paint and paintbrushes, 6-year-old Jordann said she didn’t want black, that she likes different colors. I explained our first step was to paint the white canvas completely black.  As I spoke, I was reminded of the words of an artist who painted many sunlit landscapes and night scenes where light shone from windows. He said that he must paint the darkness first in order for light to glow in the way that made him famous.

So they painted all black and waited as paint dried. Later I painted words and added tiny lights.  Everyone loves this simple illustration of a favorite Christmas song.  I love, too, that it illustrates hope – the coming of light to darkness, the very image of Advent.

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; Those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them a light has shined.”   Isaiah 9:2

” …this is indeed a season of lights shining in darkness- candles in windows, colored lights on nighttime trees, a lantern glow in a stable, a star shining high in the heavens. Help me follow the light of these images to the unquenchable ligt of Your real presence.”   ~ in Christ the Light of the World by Thomas Kinkade, Anne Christian Buchanan, and Debra K. Klingsporn

Recollect

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On my piano rests a book given to me by my son years ago. Every year around the middle of November, I take the book from its place on a bookshelf and place it again on the piano so that we can enjoy hearing and singing this music again.  It is a collection of Christmas music from around the world, many very old traditional carols. I do not form a new collection; I remember this very good one and bring it close to me so that I can use it, savoring the words and melodies.

This is a good picture of the word recollect for me.  My grandparents used that word, pronouncing it “reck-o-lect,”  as remembering.  But the wider meaning is one of gathering back, of bring back to awareness, to assemble again something that is scattered.

It is this sense of gathering back that I am given as Advent unfolds. As I choose to open my music book once more, I am practicing one part of this remembrance.

Saving Word Seeds

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Magnolia seeds are covered with a red waxy coat.  Birds love them, but propagation of the tree from seed is difficult because of the process of extracting the seeds and preserving them. A row of Magnolia trees grew along the edge of the schoolyard that adjoined the yard of the house where I grew up. As a little girl I admired the beauty and fragrance of their blooms and played with the glossy leaves and  brown suede cones, delighting in those red-coated seeds. There were always so many, and more would come the following year. I never thought to ask why there were no trees that sprouted from all those seeds.

In a similar fashion, we are surrounded by words as Advent begins and the calendar counts down to Christmas. Beyond the noise urging us to commercialize and socialize and make our list of things to do, there are words that can help us to be quiet and still, to reflect, to simply be.  It is these words I would like to extract and preserve as Advent begins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let It Begin Again

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sitting in early morning darkness

waiting for slivers of dawn

I light one candle,

dispelling this room’s darkness

sunday morning in church

one purple candle will flicker

all signs of beginning

the ancient Advent story

of dark need

of light coming

again

Saying Grace

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IMG_1063                      Our entire Satsuma harvest – but the tree is very small.
                                 
 As we move toward the end of November, our garden is a reminder of things that can be counted on: Gulf Coast Muhly fronds mound up like pink froth.   Satsumas are ready for harvest, Meyer lemons are hanging ready on the tree, the last of our okra and tender herbs fade as the first frost comes. Marigolds, chrysanthemums and calendula bloom gold and copper. Thanksgiving is less than a week away.  We will gather friends and family and favorite foods at full tables.

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Marigolds

I am remembering childhood meals around my Terrell grandparent’s table in Smith County, Texas. There were hearty breakfasts with farm fresh eggs, sausage, biscuits and gravy,  dinners (at lunchtime) that often included  peas and tomatoes from their garden and an iron skillet of cornbread cut into wedges.There were suppers, often the same food reheated or a bowl of soup, and Sunday dinners after church. There were holiday meals at Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas where the table and kitchen were both filled with chicken and dressing or a ham, plus those garden fresh vegetables which had been put up into canning jars. To follow, there would be an assortment of sweets – cookies, sweet potato, pecan, and mince pies, and often a pound cake. The food and occasion might vary, but there was always the same beginning: This, too, was something I could count on.  Papa Terrell would say grace. Today we may say a blessing or give thanks, but he always said grace.  The words were always the same, and rattled off so quickly I could never understand them.  But his posture spoke to my heart with no need for words.  Over 70 years later, now I see him clearly in my mind:  gray head bent forward and bowed in humility.

“We offer grace at table as a form of waiting with confidence…reciting such a prayer is sometimes referred to as a way of preparing to receive all that has been granted to us. We offer grace in amazement that even the good things we have rejected are being offered again. And then we eat, and the food meets an earthly need of our souls, and we are made whole.” – Cynthia Rigby, W.C. Brown Professor of Theology, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary*

For me, the calendar days designated to Thanksgiving are a wonderful approach to  beginning of Advent exactly because of this waiting with confidence…preparing to receive all that has been granted to us. Our family will gather once again around the old oak table, the very same one that Grandma loaded with food and where Papa said grace.

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Pink Gulf Coast Muhly, a coastal grass

*as quoted by Wayne Slater in DallasNews, a Texas Faith Blog

Story Telling

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gray and grateful, I am

glad to be grandmother

holding this child who continues my story

she sleeps in my arms

as if melted and poured out,

I am melted and poured out too

 

Nothing in my life prepared me for how being a grandmother would change me.  I should have suspected, remembering the molding and mentoring of my own grandmother and seeing the love and tenderness my mother gave with abandon to my sons when she became a grandmother.  Our first granddaughter came to us when she was three, when our oldest son brought her and her mother to meet us for the first time. I enjoyed fussing over her, and when my son married the two of them, was tickled when she began calling me my Grandmother name, Granmary, instead of Mary Ann. I jumped into being a grandmother without a second thought,love, tea parties and all.  And when her sister Skye was born.12 years ago, I was ready and waiting to be crazy about this baby,  cherished from the moment of the announcement of her conception. I kept a journal during the time we waited for her birth, a practice which I continued 9 years ago with Madelyn, 6 years ago with Jordann, and this year with Nora! This is something I now realize helped me tell family story to them and to welcome them into that story. As they grow and interact with me, I have many exciting opportunities to add to our together stories!

Every grandchild that is born is another leap of heart and soul for me, each one unique.  I am changed forever in my love for them and my joy in them.  And I am increasingly aware of the importance of our story and the need to tell it.  It is another Mary Oliver moment: “Pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it.”

“My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.

Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally.

If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually. The God of biblical faith is a God who started history going in the first place. He is also a God who moment by moment, day by day continues to act in history always, which means both the history that gets written down in the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle and at the same time my history and your history, which for the most don’t get written down anywhere except in the few lines that may be allotted to us some day on the obituary page.

The Exodus, the Covenant, the entry into the Promised Land—such mighty acts of God as these appear in Scripture, but no less mighty are the acts of God as they appear in our own lives.”    Frederick Buechner