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)

Advent Eve

Evening falls on Anticipation
flurry of wings and a song.

This is the time of deep darkness
when we are pushed towards the edge of despair
till we learn to see hope in a star’s light:
the truth of salvation draws near.

We must each find our way in this darkness
a still hush that will hold
till we feel the brush of an angel’s wing
and are filled with the promise of God.