awake, o north wind

……..Comfort, O comfort my people,
….says your God.
……..Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

I am black and comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,

……..Behold, I will do a new thing;
……..now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?
……..I will even make a way in the wilderness,
……..and rivers in the desert.

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.

By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth:
I sought him, but I found him not.
I will rise now, and go about the city
in the streets, and in the broad ways
I will seek him whom my soul loveth

And he came to her and said, ‘Greetings, favoured one! The Lord is with you.’ But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.

Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness,
leaning upon her beloved?

The angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.

I slept, but my heart was awake.
Listen! my beloved is knocking

Mary said to the angel, ‘How can this be, since I am a virgin?’ The angel said to her, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you;

Awake, O north wind;
and come, thou south;
blow upon my garden,
that the spices thereof may flow out.

And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.’

……..a bruised reed he will not break,
……..and a dimly burning wick he will not quench

the voice of the turtle-dove
is heard in our land

Then Mary said, ‘let it be.’

I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.

Waiting for the dawn

The longest night is very close now. The dark comes before we know it, and lasts so long. On these western fringes our fires burn small – pinpricks of light in the wide darkness. The warmth of summer, the plenty of autumn – these are memories. Food is hoarded against the midwinter feasting, and after that we will hunger a little.

If we look to the north, we see only the night. Further west there is the wide restless sea – and nothing. In the southern sky, there is a bright star with a lesser in attendance. But it is to the east that we look, the eastern sky where the rim of light will grow, the distant lands where, long ago already, something wonderful happened. More wonderful still: it happens again and again, coming to assuage our darkness at the year’s turning, bringing light to the hidden places of our hearts, promising us that we have not been forgotten.

It is dark now, but it will be light. The child will bring it. Come, Lord Jesus.

Prepared?

Yesterday at evensong, the New Testament lesson (Luke 3:1-18) spoke of John the baptist challenging the people around to prepare for the coming of Christ. He instructs us to look after our neighbour – if we have two coats or food, we must share with those who have none. John says we should also be satisfied with what we have.

Christmas is now ten days away and as usual, there are still many practical tasks for me to do before then to prepare for Christmas: writing and sending Christmas cards and buying Christmas presents for loved ones amongst many other more minor tasks. Things that I do automatically without necessarily thinking of my neighbour and the thoughts and feelings of those who will receive these cards and gifts.

But preparing for Christmas and the birth of Christ in other ways? I have never thought of Advent as a time to give to others before. Yes, I’ve seen schemes to send Christmas presents to the children of prisoners or those in hospital, and also buying goats or some other live animal as a Christmas present to help someone in the developing world, but i’ve never thought of Advent as a specific time to focus on this.

Looking after our neighbour does involve helping others just as John the Baptist, and later Christ preaches. After all, doesn’t Christ come to help us all. I ask myself, what can I do to help those less fortunate than I for what is left of this Advent? How can I bring the love of Christ to them?

breath of love

….

From ‘Sabbaths 2000′

…..

III

As timely as a river

God’s timeless life passes

Into this world. It passes

Through bodies, giving life,

And past them, giving death.

The secret fish leaps up

Into the light and is

Again darkened. The sun

Comes from the dark, it lights

The always passing river,

Shines on the great-branched tree,

And goes. Longing and dark,

We are completely filled

With breath of love, in us

Forever incomplete.

…………………..- Wendell Berry, Given

At the bottom of the Mound

8

Hurtling down the Mound this week on my bike, I found myself slamming on squealing brakes as I reached the bottom, despite the lights being green.

Tim Chalk’s compelling sculpture of the nativity was what arrested me. In particular, it was the realism of the skinny newborn, draped over Mary’s shoulder, which caught my eye. “I’ve seen babies look like that,” I thought.

As I looked closer, what struck me about this scene was its sense of ordinary busyness – nothing rushed, but something in progress. The baby is old enough to have been fed, cut from his umbilical, washed, burped, and lulled to sleep. He has not yet been wrapped in a cloth and laid in the manger, although Joseph is there at the ready.

What the artist has chosen to show us is not the face of the Christ-child, encircled with a glowing halo, but Jesus’ bottom – a dangerous hold for any new parent. “Behold, your saviour comes!”

At the ‘back’ of the sculpture we see a shepherd gingerly entering the stable to offer a new-born lamb, watched by an eager sheepdog.  Outside, a shepherd-boy carries another lamb to a second shepherd, who lingers outside, as if the stable is sacred space.

*

This scene at the rear was lit by the December sun reflecting off the shop-fronts on Princes St., drawing attention to the shepherd-boy’s offering. Caught between the shops of Edinburgh’s commercial heart, and the classical grandeur of the Royal Academy building behind, the power of this humble, busy scene was magnified.

As I rode away, I left in a swirl of thoughts and feelings. A real baby, bottom and all. A young girl, who took a risk. An eager, if unskilled, father. The humble offerings of simple people. The location: rustic, sacred ground, sandwiched between symbols of commerce and culture. Clues, this Christmas, of where we might find the child.

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.

The Hidden Voices of Advent

This last week I have embarked on an orgy of reading as part of my Advent discipline.  I have dipped into Jean Vanier the founder of the L’Arche communities, Mother Theresa from the Sisters of Charity and Richard Twiss, a leader in the First Nation’s movement in North America.  At the same time I continue to grapple with what it means to live as a Christ follower in God’s global community and how our experience of the coming of Christ at this season impacts our response to the global economic crisis.

What do all these authors have in common you may well ask?  They all express powerfully our need to not just listen to voices from the margins but also to recognize that it is through people who are disabled, destitute and excluded that God often speaks most powerfully.

In this season of Advent how does Christ come to us through the voices of those who are displaced, despised and abused?  In the midst of our busyness and stress are we even open to hearing such voices and recognizing our need to listen and learn from them?

“To love is a way of looking, of touching of listening to all” Jean Vanier reminds us.  If we really long for the coming of Christ and the eternal kingdom of mutual love, abundance and wholeness that his return will bring into being in all its fullness how do we wait at this season and how do we live into this world today?  How do we live by what what NT Wright calls the language of the kingdom and what James calls the royal law – love for God and love of neighbour.

I think that to live in true anticipation of the coming of Christ we must commit ourselves afresh to live according to this language of love.  We must all open our eyes to see and respond to the face of God in every stranger.  We must open our eyes to hear the voice of God in every outcast and must open our lives to be the love of God to every person we encounter who has been cast bu the wayside because of race, class, education, disabilities, illness, gender or any other disfigurement that excludes them from our lives and our society.  It is not an easy task that God challenges us with but it is essential if we really want to see the light of Christ shine in the many dark places of our world.

Maybe as part of your Advent reflections this week you would like to listen to this short video that expresses Mother Theresa’s view of the importance of the poor and the destitute

Elizabeth’s Story

All the long years of pitying glances rolled away in the glory of this conception. There was an absolute rightness in it. The angel appearing in the holy Temple, in the right place, and at the sacred time. The promise of the holiness of the child.

God had indeed remembered his promises, his old ways of working. I dreamed of a future for this child. He would restore the ancient purity of ways, the law strictly observed, and Israel called back to the true pure path. The comparison which I could not help making was between my husband and myself and the greatest of all our ancestors, Abraham and Sarah. We had always tried so hard to live holy lives, Zechariah and I – and now we were to be rewarded. And yes, Zechariah had, to some degree made a bit of a mess of it, but he had surely be forgiven, or my belly would not have been swelling with a baby.

Conceived like this, my child would surely be – well, he HAD to be the long awaited Messiah, didn’t he? As great and greater than Elijah, Moses, Isaac, Israel himself.

So great was my joy that I was generous when word reached me that my young cousin Mary was – well, that she had- well, Mary came to stay for a little.

She stood in the doorway. My heart seemed to stop still. My baby leapt in me like a fish breaking water. Every certainty stood on its head. Purity was swallowed in love. Repentance was engulfed by forgiveness. The reward of virtue went down before the glory of self offering. What I was, what my child was, that too went down. Now, what had been first would be last. And she, who by rights would have been last, she was the first. Impurity had become healing, rebirth.

My child? What could I and he do but spread ourselves out in the service of she and hers.

‘Who am I to see the mother of my Master?’ I cried. Every certainty was lost in a huge hope.

Christ our Advent hope

Christ our Advent hope,

bare brown trees,

etched dark across a winter sky,

leaves fallen, rustling.

ground hard and cold, remind us to prepare for your coming;

remind us to prepare for the time

when the soles of your feet will touch the ground,

when you will become one of us

to be at one with us.

Kate McIlhagga

‘Your life is hidden with Christ in God.’ Col. 3:3

With prophets crying out in the wilderness, there is much of revelation in Advent.

And yet I also sense a different movement. This is a time for pondering how God is both revealed and concealed. Hidden.

God hidden within mundane materialities. Within language. Within relationships.

And what of us? Are we not also hidden within God?