Light and darkness

During Advent I have been very aware of light.  These thoughts started with the Christmas lights in George Square, Glasgow.  As I waited to cross the road on the way to work, I realised that I could see the coloured lights on the edge of the square.  They did not make much sense, like the cliche they looked like the back of the tapestry, just a mixture of colour without any pattern.  To me they looked like the false lights of Christmas, set up well in advance of Christmastide, with no idea of Advent as a time of waiting and expectation.  Missing the point.

But I became more aware of light generally as the days went by.  The days last weekend, when the sun did not appear to rise above the horizon.  Monday when the sun bright, but low.  The darkness of the evenings as I make my way home.

Thoughts of what the Bible says about light and darkness: The Lord is my light and my salvation - whom shall I fear?  (Ps 27:1) 

The central thought came last Thursday evening as I sat in a candlelit church:  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it (Jn 1:5).  In the darkness aware of the light all around knowing that night is not dark to God, we wait again for the celebration of the coming of Christ, who is with us as we wait.

This light of Christ that is the true light.  Jesus said, ‘I am the light of the world.  Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.’  (Jn 8:12)  The light that is worth the wait.

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

Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus

Today is the 300th Anniversary of the birth of Charles Wesley. As we ‘pass this way but once’ we wistfully think of what we might leave behind. I’d gladly settle for Wesley’s legacy of hymns written on the hearts of generations of people of faith and almost/becoming faith. It seems to me that hymns are the great engines which teach faith and engender hope - to sing our faith in the great hymns is to imprint it on heart and mind and soul.

So as we sing in this Advent season, ‘Come thou long-expected Jesus, born to set thy people free’, we are moving towards, ‘Hark, the Herald Angels sing, Glory to the new-born King.’

+David

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.

From the greats…

The voice of one crying in the wilderness is the voice of one breaking the silence. Prepare the way for the Lord, he says, as though he were saying: “I speak out in order to lead him into your hearts, but he does not choose to come where I lead him unless you prepare the way for him”.

To prepare the way means to pray well; it means thinking humbly of oneself. We should take our lesson from John the Baptist. He is thought to be the Christ; he declares he is not what they think. He does not take advantage of their mistake to further his own glory.

If he had said, “I am the Christ”, you can imagine how readily he would have been believed, since they believed he was the Christ even before he spoke. But he did not say it; he acknowledged what he was. He pointed out clearly who he was; he humbled himself. He saw where his salvation lay. He understood that he was a lamp, and his fear was that it might be blown out by the wind of pride.

Not my words, but those of one of the greats in the Christian tradition - Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in Roman North Africa preaching in the fifth century of the Common Era.

They always lead me to reflect that we are essentially humble strangers, not pilgrims on our journey through this life. If we have 70 or 80 years what are those years except building blocks for those who come after us and who may go on to do far greater things? That in essence was the life and task of The Baptiser - to be a humble, if vociferous, stranger.

One of the prolific writers and preachers of the last century, Bishop Richard Holloway, reflected on the building of a future as strangers at the end of his Looking in the Distance:

When the map of our life is complete, and we die in the richness of our own history, some among the living will miss us for a while, but the earth will go on without us. Its day is longer than ours, though we now know that it too will die. Our brief finitude is but a beautiful spark in the vast darkness of space. So we should live the fleeting day with passion and, when the night comes, depart from it with grace.

There is a remorseless, almost hopeless and atheistic sadness underlying this kind of writing; but perhaps there is also something of the reality of some of the human experience of being alive and then dying?

Overshadowed by the Spirit

This is a meditation I read at the reflective service for Advent we had in St Mary’s on Tuesday. It was a good night. Darkness and candles. Prayers and Singing. And the lovely bellringers pealing out good news into the night at just the right moment. Complete serendipity.

Advent is a time of waiting. Of darkness and light.

Historically, Advent has been understood as a time to contemplate the last things – eschatology and our own mortality. But tonight I want to attend to another movement. Rather than mortality, let us consider our natality. Our birth.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt asks us to consider our role in creation. Our role is natality – we are all born. We are all someone’s child. And this attention to birth brings us to our creativity – our ability to begin anew. To begin again.

The flocks

 

 

So, this bloke, this townie, says: ‘and how did you know they were your two ewes when you found them in old Sam’s flock?’  Well, you can’t say what springs to mind can you?  I mean he wasn’t to know better, I suppose, and ‘how do you find your bum with both hands?’ well,  it wasn’t going to help.  So I just said: ‘Well each sheep is different, isn’t it?  Each face?  And the body and the way the tail hangs.  But more than that, they didn’t look right at home in Sam’s flock – and of course when I called, they looked straight up and at me.’

Well, of course they did.  My sheep. 

Awkward little sods, sheep.  If they do go missing it is always in vile weather – too hot, too cold, the first really wet day for months.  And then they are always looking for an opportunity to die – get stuck, get tangled up, hurl themselves of a bit of rock,  anything will do.  And then they are always needing something – feet sorted, wool off, fed, something.  Endless ruddy work. 

But just call, and they will follow.  My sheep just follow me.  The hardest thing I need to do, each year, is to decide which animals go for cull.  Each year, we breed a few more than we need.  For the good of the flock, you need to pick out which are to go – to die.  Sacrificed, you might say.  One or two actually are, of course, sacrificed.  But each one that goes, it’s a sacrifice to make the rest stronger, healthier.  Poor ruddy sheep.

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.

Advent Penitence

I am, as my children are too polite to say, beginning to have some difficulty with the days of the week. So with suitable Advent penitence, I note that it is now Wednesday and I should have posted on Tuesday. When I remembered, I was pirouetting on a step ladder attempting to fix some suitably naff Christmas lights to the exterior of the porch at Blogstead Episcopi. We’ve just done the ritual which I always find difficult - the choice of the tree and the installing of the same in such a way that something which is inherently crooked is made to appear impeccably straight. But it’s all Advent stuff - all the preparing, not just with heart and mind, but with body and action too for the coming of Christmas. And all the rushing and fuss, the crowded shops and car parks, the impossibility of finding out what to buy for Auntie Flo, the joy of receiving Christmas cards from the very people whom one has quietly removed from the list - all of it is part of the watching and the waiting in the darkness of our lives for the ‘great light’ which we hope to see.