Anticipation….of customer service

I know how the Inn Keeper felt, letting Joseph and Mary down by telling them there was no rooms free for the mother in anticipation.
Working in Customer Services for the past 3 Christmas’ I have become accustomed to letting people down gently.
“I’m sorry your delivery will be late”
“I’m sorry your turkey smelled off when you went to cook it on Christmas eve”

As Christmas draws closer, and especially as it become more commercial year on year, I pray for greater “Goodwill among all men” I think it’s the only thing that might keep me sane.

Continually one prayer comes to mind, attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

The Serenity Prayer:

O God and Heavenly Father,

Grant to us the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot be changed;
the courage to change that which can be changed,
and the wisdom to know the one from the other,
through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen

Watching

This time last week a casual observer walking the dog in Kilmun arboretum – it was pouring with rain so why else would anybody be about? – might have wondered what two women the wrong side of middle age skulking in the trees and wielding large black bags could possibly be up to. Indeed if they had ventured nearer and heard the excited exclamations, “Oh! Pendulous fronds!” “Fluffy filling!” they might have wondered further.

A partial answer might have been afforded should they stick around to see one of the women look about furtively then whip out a pair of secateurs and set about cutting branches from the nearby trees and stashing them into one of the bin-bags, slithering down perilous slopes to reach temptingly pink berries and having to be hauled up again by her partner in crime

Alleluia-verse for the Virgin

Alleluia! lightburst from your untouched

womb like a flower

on the farther side

of death. The world-tree

is blossoming. Two

realms become one.

- Hildegard of Bingen, translated by Barbara Newman

A God who comes

If you want God, and long for union with him, yet sometimes wonder what that means or whether it can mean anything at all, you are already walking with the God who comes. If you are at times so weary and involved with the struggle of living that you have no strength even to want him, yet are still dissatisfied that you don’t, you are already keeping Advent in your life. If you have ever had an obscure intuition that the truth of things is somehow better, greater, more wonderful than you deserve or desire, that the touch of God in your life stills you by its gentleness, that there is a mercy beyond anything you could ever suspect, you are already drawn into the central mystery of salvation.
Your hope is not a mocking dream; God creates in human hearts a huge desire and a sense of need, because he wants to fill them with the gift of himself ….

You yourself are the place of desire and need. All your love, your stretching out, your hope, your thirst, God is creating in you so that he may fill you. It is not your desire that makes it happen, but his. He longs through your heart …. He is on the inside of your longing.

- Maria Boulding

I first encountered this passage when a dear friend asked me to read it at an Advent service. I found it intensely moving, and when I returned to my place I saw the tears on my friend’s face. It carries for me all the longing and all the reassurance of the season.

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.

The Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

There is no rose of such virtue…

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/729396