salvete

Twice this week I have found myself preaching  and saying ‘this is the season when God turns the world upside down: when all our expectations are broken and something new begins.’  And that is the way with preaching, sometimes:  God makes us repeat and repeat and repeat an idea till we notice what we have said.

So today,  this topsy-turvy world of Advent is offering themes of Salvation, re-creation, coming to life again;  the themes of Lent.  Time bends back on itself to welcome eternity, and all the golden threads are revealed.

I have never found it easy — nor indeed desirable — to hang salvation solely on the cross.   Healing begins with Incarnation:  a new-babe born into a world of possibility, God-with-us teaching us how to be human.   Oh, I know the dangers of this sort of talk.  No, I don’t think Christ is simply an exemplar.  Yes, I believe things ‘happen’ along the way that truly change the  state of our being with God.    But more than that, I believe that it is in seeing God-with-us that we are saved.  It is in knowing, deep within ourselves, that there is no part of our human life which is separated from God’s love, no part that cannot be transformed and redeemed by Christ’s presence.   All life is held in God’s longing and loving.

The time of our salvation is near.

O Come quickly.  Come, Lord come.

sapphires and diamonds

Truth shall spring up from the earth
and righteousness shall look down from heaven.

…………………………………………………..Ps 85.11

For all that the rhetoric of Advent is ‘watch and wait,’ the reality of December is often very different.  Holiday shopping, dance recitals and nativity plays; parties and too many ‘Christmas’ lunches; Carol services and tree trimming parties; and too often, an expected-unexpected death of who hasn’t the energy to fight through another New Year.

In the midst of all that, prayer is honoured more in the desire than the reality.   But God is ever creative, finding new ways to interrupt us and give us God’s presence.

Once this week, the moment God caught was as sudden as the silence of the radio being switched off as I drove over a hill and the light filled the fields with gold.

And then, a moment that took slightly more effort on my part: an hour in Durham cathedral as the light faded through the east window.   But surely, that’s cheating:  claiming that in an hour spent in a cathedral God still has to catch us off guard.  True enough, I had gone to pray.   I love Durham cathedral, and it has often been a place where ‘things happen’.  But the chapel where I had planned to pray was full of Christmas tree and plans for dismantling my soul to see if God would put it back together again were much in jeopardy. (It’s not quite the sort of thing one can do in the nave.)

I began wandering.  I asked the steward where I might pray uninterrupted, but the miltary chapel he suggested was no use, so I slipped in by the high altar.  I didn’t go into the pews where the rehearsing choir would see me, but up towards the pulpit on the marble steps where I could see altar and reredos and rose window.  The stewards decided to be tolerant.   In summer, they’d have asked me not to sit there, but in the hush of a December twilight they could  be generous.

And so God seized his chance. It wasn’t the time or place for the unbuilding and rebuilding of souls.  Instead, I was given sapphires and diamonds; the evening show of stained glass, and spotlights glinting off silver.  The choir began singing Adam lay y-bounden, and I sang with them:  Deo Gratias.

months back

The Messenger

There is some sentry at the rim of winter
Fed with the speech the wind makes
In the grand belfries of the sleepless timber.

He understands the lasting strife of tears,
And the way the world is strung;
He waits to warn all life with the tongue of March’s bugle,
Of the coming of the warrior sun.
When spring has garrisonned up her army of water,
A million grasses leave their tents, and stand in rows
To see their invincible brother.
Mending the winter’s ruins with their laughter,
The flowers go out to their undestructive wars.

Walk in the woods and be witnesses,
You the best of these poor children.

When Gabriel hit the bright shore of the world,
Yours were the eyes saw some
Star-sandalled stranger walk like lightening down the air,
The morning the Mother of God
Loved and dreaded the message of an angel.

Thomas Merton,
Selected Poems

potter’s clay

What sort of God do you long for today?

A God who comforts you?  …who offers hope?  …who comes in a sharp shaft of light and takes your breath away?

Do you long, with Isaiah, for a God who will tear open the heavens and come down, kindle the dryness of your heart like brushwood, and bring you to life as heat stirs motion in water?  Or today are you the clay, being formed and reformed, built up, then pushed down?

That is the image that haunts me this week:  the clay knocked down, so that creating can being again.

Once, long ago, at a time of a hopeless decision — something I knew I had to do, and knew I would fail in doing — I sat with a hand-full of play-dough.  Time and again, I moulded the dream I longed for and let myself look at it.  Time and again I pushed it flat and rolled it back into a ball.

It took a long time to find myself in the warm unformed lump of clay.  It took a long time to find God there, and not in the dream I’d been fabricating.

But here, at the start of Advent,  we are free to be without form.  At the time of just beginning, we are free to rest in the uncertain dark, sure that light will come.  Light and form, given in Christ.   The shape of our lives, known and liveable at last.

All is Calm

Thank you for sharing Advent with us.
A blessed Christmas to you all.

Love Blooms Bright will return for Advent 2008.

and all creation waits

The river takes the land, and leaves nothing.
Where the great slip gave way in the bank
and an acre disappeared, all human plans
dissolve. An awful clarification occurs
where a place was. Its memory breaks
from what is known now, begins to drift.
Where cattle grazed and trees stood, emptiness
widens the air for birdflight, wind, and rain.
As before the beginning, nothing is there.
Human wrong is in the cause, human
ruin in the effect–but no matter;
all will be lost, no matter the reason.
Nothing, having arrived, will stay.
The earth, even, is like a flower, so soon
passeth it away. And yet this nothing
is the seed of all–the clear eye
of Heaven, where all the worlds appear.
Where the imperfect has departed, the perfect
begins its struggle to return. The good gift
begins again its descent. The maker moves
in the unmade, stirring the water until
it clouds, dark beneath the surface,
stirring and darkening the soul until pain
perceives new possibility. There is nothing
to do but learn and wait, return to work
on what remains. Seed will sprout in the scar.
Though death is in the healing, it will heal.

–Wendell Berry
The Slip

because someone had to

This is a bit off focus for this blog, but in the absence of any other post appearing today, here is a little something for you to play with (think of it as enacted meditation if you like):

Make a Flake — paper snowflakes without the mess.

children of promise

from Wendy Wright, The Vigil:

Advent is a time in which we are invited to turn our attention the fact that we are recipients of a promise. As a culture we seem to have little time for promises of the sort held out in the Old Testament… promises whose telling plunges us deep into the wilderness and mercy of God. Instead, we attend to promises of a much more limited and transient nature: buy this… and you will find beauty. Wear that… and you will win love. Drive this…and you will achieve power… Our media is filled with such promises…We purchase perfumes with labels like Joy, Knowing, and Dreams. …as a culture we have co-opted our own ability to articulate and dream out of the most fundamental longings of our hearts.

To open ourselves to the possibility that there is a more radical, all-embracing promise than the ones offered by commercial enterprises eager to take our money and play on our restless longings in order that we might buy more is to begin to live the season of Advent.

What we all dream, what we all hope for is simple. We dream that the glimpses of the fullness of love that we sense occasionally in our lives, show us what we were created to become.

When a young father takes his newborn daughter into his arms for the first time; … when an estranged couple grope their way painfully back into love… when a community provides an environment for healing… when a strange and fearful person becomes for us the face of God; it is then that we begin to sense what we are intended to be – God’s children. The Children of promise.

when life to joy awakes

When I am caught in the rush and frenzy of December and all focused thought of Advent is at risk, the shape and coherence of the season is held for me by the music.  There is the sharp anticipation of I look from afar (‘tell us, art thou he that should come’), the deep familiarity of O Come, O Come Emmanuel, the joy of Gabriel’s Message, and the hush of Marian lullabies.  But this year, the Advent earworm has been a Kingdom hymn — not usually my chosen genre at all:

The King shall come when morning dawns
and light triumphant breaks
when morning guilds the eastern hills
and life to joy awakes.

Not, as of old, a little child,
to bear and fight and die,
but crowned with glory like the sun
that lights the morning sky.

The King shall come when morning dawns
and earth’s dark night is past;
O haste the rising of that morn,
the day that e’er shall last;

And let the endless bliss begin,
by weary saints foretold,
when right shall triumph over wrong,
and truth shall be extolled.

The King shall come when morning dawns
and light and beauty brings:
Hail, Christ the Lord! Thy people pray,
come quickly, King of kings.

It is such a wonderful inversion of most stories of eschatology, in which our joy is projected into a heavenly Kingdom that is not-now, not-here, not-yet.  But imagine if it were the other way round.  What if the fullness of God’s kingdom is brought about by our waking to joy, our being alight with God, and filled with the beauty of the morning sky?

What if Advent is not about our waiting for God at all, but is about God waiting for us?

eschatology

What if this road, that has held no surprises
these many years, decided not to go
home after all; what if it could turn
left or right with no more ado
than a kite-tail? What if its tarry skin
were like a long, supple bolt of cloth,
that is shaken and rolled out, and takes
a new shape from the contours beneath?
And if it chose to lay itself down
in a new way; around a blind corner,
across hills you must climb without knowing
what’s on the other side; who would not hanker
to be going, at all risks? Who wants to know
a story’s end, or where a road will go?

 –Sheenagh Pugh
What if This Road and Other Poems (2003)