Almost Advent

It is almost Advent. The night is far gone; the day is near. There are lights on the far side of the old reservoir; but in between, where the garden is, and the almost leafless trees, is perfect black, deep and velvety, its sleeping birds hidden entirely from view. It is hard to believe there ever was anything but this deep night.

It is Black Friday. It should be a day of penitence, it feels, of cleansing - of laying down the empty, heavy things that freight our longings. The trackless wind of the Spirit blows where it chooses, and we hear the sound of it, but we do not know where it comes from or where it goes. In the unseen places within us, already, we feel it lift the hair of our hearts.

Come, Lord. The hollow earth waits, the night is open. Make straight the ways of your love in all that we are. Emmanuel, wake us from our sleep, our uneasy dreaming, with your angel words, as you woke poor Joseph to a strange new hidden life with you.

Come, Lord, come - this of all Advents, come.

Christmas night…

Sometimes people assume that ‘good’ Christians have no doubts, never ask questions, never experience a sense of bewilderment in the face of cruelty or disaster. That is demonstrably untrue. To be a Christian is surely to live with uncertainty, relying on the gift of faith to bridge the gap between our understanding and our questioning…the God we seek is not a God afar off, but God-with-us, one who has shared our humanity and calls us to share in his divinity…

There in a nutshell is what Christmas is about. In his compassion and love, God wills to take our human flesh and blood and redeem us through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. Our salvation is very near. It began with Mary’s generous-hearted consent to be the Mother of God. It will take physical shape with the birth of Jesus on Christmas night. It will be completed only when all are one with Him in the Kingdom. Truly, this is ‘a mystery hidden from long ages, a secret into which even angels long to look!

from Digitalnun’s iBenedictines blog

Each Christmas might be our last on earth. There is such a glorious fragility about this season, when we celebrate the birth of a tiny, vulnerable baby—who just happened to be the Son of God—to a young Jewish girl far from home in the middle of occupied territory, Her faith, the loyalty of her husband Joseph, the kindness of strangers, opened the door to eternity in the person of that little new-born lad.

Christmas night is holy. Of all nights of the year there truly is an uncanny glory about this one. This is no myth, no fairy-tale to hold back the dark. This is God, touching all that he has made with the most tender love, the most glorious power of mercy—with his saving grace made Mary’s Son…

The persistence of what we must still call faith…

The best metaphor for our world of today is astronauts speeding through the cosmos, but with their life-supporting capsule pierced by a meteorite fragment. But the Church resembles Mary and Joseph travelling from Egypt to Nazareth on a donkey, holding in their arms the weakness and poverty of the Child Jesus: God incarnate.

Carlo Caretto, The God Who Comes, with thanks to inward/outward

Our waiting is always shaped by alertness to the Word. It is waiting in the knowledge that someone wants to address us. The question is, are we home? Are we at our address, ready to respond to the doorbell? We need to wait together, to keep each other at home spiritually, so that when the Word comes it can become flesh in us. That is why the Book of God is always in the midst of those who gather. We read the Word so that the Word can become flesh and have a whole new life in us.

Henri J.M. Nouwen, Finding My Way Home, p.107, The Crossroad Publishing Company

Our waiting is what the world calls weakness. The world wants action, decisiveness, assertiveness, alacrity—these are the strengths it admires and nurtures, demands.

Our Lord was hidden in his mother’s womb for 9 long months, and then hidden, as Caretto tells us, in her arms all that long and vulnerable journey into exile in Egypt. His early life, back in Nazareth, was hidden among sawdust and stacked planks, down some dusty unrecorded narrow street.

Our life in Advent is hidden in the darkness of unknowing, our eyes turned to the pain in which we are, by our plain createdness, hopelessly implicated. Or it would be hopeless, were it not for the rumour of prophecy, the persistence of what we must still call faith…