by June Friesen
And God caused a light to shine across my pathway only visible in this photo –
Not visible to the eye as walking. And so it is with God – as we walk, as we wait – He is present.
John 14:1-7
1“Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me. 2 There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? 3 When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am. 4 And you know the way to where I am going.”
5 “No, we don’t know, Lord,” Thomas said. “We have no idea where you are going, so how can we know the way?”
6 Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. 7 If you had really known me, you would know who my Father is. From now on, you do know him and have seen him!”
Waiting in Silence: HOPE
- What brings you through a dark day/days?
- What could possibly add life to your life this year?
- Have many of us, particularly in the church in America, lost all hope or most of it like the Israelites did? Are we focused on Covid, it’s high risk, isolation, not being able to be with family, friends, church family on Sunday, so much so that we may miss where Jesus wants us to see Him or find Him this year? Or are we going to be open to where, when and how Jesus is going to come to us as individuals, families, friends in new ways? Maybe the ways that Jesus shows up will be so different and strange to us that we almost – and maybe some will actually miss Him.
- How about Joseph? How about Mary? How about you and me? Is God asking us to step outside our comfort zone this year? What might that look like? Will others question us or even challenge our sanity? I know that there are many who have to continue to work in precarious places because they are necessary staff to meet the needs of people who are ill, cannot care for themselves, in many and varied situations……I admit that this is probably one of the hardest things for me to struggle with.
- So Jesus reminds us that if we remain true to Him – recognize Him as our God and Savior that He will come back for us to take us to heaven – yet all we are greeted with for now over 2,000 years is silence – so my friends – what about this hope? What about the silence of God?
Waiting In God’s Silence
God, where are you?
Are you really alive?
Do you see all the suffering?
All the anxiety over Covid?
All the animosity between people groups?
All the struggling about power, right and wrong?
Do You really care?
Do You really care about ‘the Church?’
Do You really care about me?
You tell Your People to wait.
You told the Israelites to wait and look what happened….
They missed your arrival for the most part –
They even crucified Your Son –
Yes, I know that was a part of the plan –
And I am sure that this Covid is part of your plan too –
However –
The quietness looms in largeness –
The loneliness grows deeper –
The emptiness seems exaggerated –
The powerlessness is –
Well, it is just so consuming –
In fact, the powerlessness is causing
Self-centered and inner focused people
With pure selfishness and self-preservation
As the be all and end all.
Then I hear Jesus whisper within –
“Child of mine – come, come with me –
Sit here quietly with me and listen to my heart –
I have hope to share with you –
Hope that will bring you all the way through to the end
When you will enter into my arms to be welcomed to your eternal home.
Yes, my child, it is hard to hope when the pain is everywhere,
It is hard to hope when animosity among people is so great,
I remember what it was like too and wondered if the resurrection would be real for me,
And as I faced that struggle everyone else had their own disappointment and pain
Leaving me alone, feeling so alone, so hopeless –
But my child, I knew without a doubt that my Father cared and loved me,
And He was victorious in the end giving me back even a better life –
And so here is my ‘Hope Gift’ for you today –
‘Please trust me with your earthly life today, and every day,
Especially in the midst of this dark time,
I will hold it safely until it is ultimately gifted
With eternal life as you enter my eternal home prepared especially for you.
I love you my child (your name),
I cannot wait until we meet face to face,
You will make it – trust me –
Together we will make it in spite of Covid and anything and everything else,
Because My Father said that nothing shall separate any of His children from me ever.
I LOVE YOU! YOU ARE SPECIAL!
See you soon.” Amen.
by Kate Kennington Steer, (all images by Kate Kennington Steer)
I put on some music,
trying to catch a mood,
but the invented rhythms
do nothing.
So I listen instead
to the cackle and spit of the fire,
the roar and hiss of the rain,
the howl and whip of the wind
and ah,
yes,
there it is.
‘Mood Music’
from Devastating Beauty, Gideon Heugh
During this year when I have been deliberately seeking to explore the way colour affects my life, I found myself reflecting on the choice of the colour blue as the symbol for creating a new feast day. The modern Church has dubbed today, the shortest day of the year, the Winter Solstice, as ‘Blue Christmas’: an opportunity to celebrate the presence and worth of all those individuals who find this season particularly difficult, whether through physical or mental illness, through grief, through poverty, through family violence and abuse, or through loneliness and abandonment. By consciously bringing all these to mind, the hope is that we will all increase our compassion, understanding and welcome towards those who are often considered outsiders and strangers, shut out from the traditional, commercial or religious rituals that surround this time of the year.
So why ‘blue’? The first resonance which comes to my mind is the phrase ‘feeling blue’, to describe someone’s mental and emotional state. It might imply a mild, but heartfelt, depressed moment, day or season in someone’s life; or an elongated experience of a foggy blankness that nothing seems to touch. There is a vagueness about this blue, a I-don’t-really-know-what’s-wrong-with-me blue, describing someone who is downcast, feeling separated, isolated, dislocated, excluded, from the normal bustle of the everyday world in that moment.
It is often suggested that any emotional turmoil associated with ‘feeling blue’ might be healed with the spiritual and neural muscle memory which regular meditation can give. Such a holistic approach might bring about the antidote of a ‘blue mind’, as Wallace J. Nichols comments:
Blue Mind is a mildly meditative state characterized by calm, peacefulness, unity, and a sense of general happiness and satisfaction with life in the moment. It is inspired by water and elements associated with water, from the color blue to the words we use to describe the sensations associated with immersion.
In utter contrasts to this, there’s ‘singing the Blues’. This blue streams out of the roots of Negro-Spirituals of the deep South of the U.S.A. This blue is a scream of pain born out of human experiences no being should ever undergo – let alone at the hands of another through enslavement, trafficking, or torture. It is a blue wail of rage and grief that comes from places that I, as a white, educated, British woman, will never comprehend. The fact that there are unnumbered musicians down the centuries who have made beauty from this blue, who have sought to expand upon this blue and explore its multifarious facets, is a source of awe and wonder to me.
Then there’s the ‘blue hour’, the phase of sunset which, for photographers, follows the ‘golden hour’. These are the blues of twilight – whether civil, nautical or astronomical (the degrees to which the sun has descended below the horizon). These are the blues of longing, of distance, of ambiguity and mystery, of descent towards the dark. In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit writes:
The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel…Blue the color that represents the spirit, the sky, and water, the immaterial and the remote, so that however tactile and up-close it is, it is always about distance and disembodiment. (39,159)
In a letter from December 1828, the English painter Samuel Palmer wrote this evocative description of the ‘blue hour’:
Creation sometimes pours into the spiritual eye the radiance of Heaven: the green mountains that glimmer in a summer gloaming from the dusky yet bloomy East … [These things] shed a mild, a grateful, an unearthly lustre into the inmost spirits, and seem the interchanging twilight of that peaceful country, where there is no sorrow or night. Every light eternally on the change: yet no light finally extinguished.
That I might see ‘every light eternally on the change: yet no light finally extinguished’ seems to sum up the hope that lies deep under all the ambiguity and lostness of my own blues-song. So this year, I am deliberately trying to take note of twilight, charting the shifts in me as another set of daylights fade into nightlights in the sky outside my window. I hope to be deliberate about gathering into me all the hues of blues, and as earth-time leans into darkness, to help my spirit-time lean towards the lights reflected back to my eyes in even the darkest of indigo tones.
Here is a light which the eye inevitably seeks with a deeper feeling of the beautiful – the light of a declining day, and the flakes of scarlet cloud burning like watchfires in the green sky of the horizon; a deeper feeling, I say, not perhaps more acute but having more of spiritual hope and longing … all that is dazzling in colour and perfect in form [is evanescent and shallow] when compared with the still small voice of the level twilight behind purple hills.
Perhaps then, deliberately, mindfully, care-fully, I can embrace all my different blues, all the shades of it that are unique to me. Perhaps then, I maybe able to sit in the blues of my lostness and see them clearly enough to realise there are others in this world, known and unknown to me, in this present moment and in the future, who need what only my Spirit-enlivened colours can give them. Perhaps then, my ‘blue mind’ might be transfigured into an offering of Grace which points straight to the One who invites me to immerse myself into the blue shadowed darknesses of the Light of the World.
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by Kim Balke and Christine Sine
Many of you, I am sure, remember my good friend Kim Balke, who had a heart transplant last year. Prior to that she was an expressive arts therapist working with children in Delta B.C.
Kim currently requires frequent blood transfusions because some of her meds are suppressing her blood production. Her disability has not meant she is inactive however. She contributed the free download Colourful Me to Godspace and still draws inspirational doodles and writes beautiful poetry, often during her long waits in hospital for the duration of her transfusions.
Kim’s creativity continues to inspire me and prompted me to ask, “What do we do while we wait during this Advent season – waiting as it were for our blood to be replenished by the light of Christ?” I think this is especially true in these last few days of Advent. The waiting gets harder the closer we get to new birth, something that I know is true for Kim as she waits for the meds she has been given to restart her haemoglobin production, to kick in and be effective.
Read through this poem below, one of those she wrote while receiving a blood transfusion. Sit quietly, take time for stillness and waiting. Perhaps you would like to doodle while you do so. How does God inspire you in this season of waiting?
Fly
My dragon fly
Through fields of Fall,
Through flavours of harvest
And the hallowed eves,
Even the fog of our unrest, unease,
Wander ‘til wings weary sleep,
To waken in my imagination,
To let winter’s waiting,
stillness,
settle seeds.
Small, hopeful deeds
Knitted into today earth,
Lullabied into lovely, laughing spring
And the beginning again of things.
But for now,
Fly
My dragon fly.
October 4, 2020, Kim Balke
by Christine Sine
It’s the last week of Advent. Yesterday, we lit our 4th Advent candle. To be honest though, my focus and I think the focus of many of us is on Christmas rather than Advent. We are really ready to celebrate the birth of Christ and I was tempted over the weekend to change out my Advent images for Christmas ones. I did move my narcissus bulbs (now flowering) and one of our poinsettias in behind my Advent wreath so that I caught a first glimpse of the Christmas season. However, I resisted switching everything to Christmas symbols and I am glad that I did.
Prompted by Lilly Lewin’s Freerange Friday, Finding Joy with the Shepherds, I read through Psalm 97 in both the Passion Translation and The Message. This verse really caught my attention:
“Light-seeds are planted in the souls of God’s people,
Joy-seeds are planted in good heart-soil” Ps 97:11 The Message
What have I done over the season of Advent to prepare good heart-soil, I wondered? And how good is the soil that I have prepared to plant and nurture the seeds of joy and light that God wants to grow in me in the coming year?
As I pondered this, I was reminded that in Meditation Monday – Plant, Grow, Flourish at the beginning of Advent, when I planted those narcissus bulbs, I wrote:
The Old Testament begins with God planting a garden, a place of utter delight, pregnant with life that is meant to grow and flourish. Here, God shapes humankind from the soil to tend the garden, drawing all of us into the eternal story as caretakers of a creation that is meant to flourish.
In the beginning of the New Testament, God plants a single seed of divine presence, a single seed of a new creation, entering the human story and meant to grow, flourish and be multiplied throughout the earth. No sculpting into being of a fully formed human this time, but the planting of a tiny seed that must grow and develop as we all did, in a mother’s dark and nurturing womb, in the right season breaking out as a new born baby that like us took years to develop into a fully mature human.
This Advent opened for me new understanding of the people around Mary and their importance in protecting, nurturing and bringing to birth the child planted and growing in her womb. Without Elizabeth, Joseph and Joseph’s family the child Jesus, this first seed of God’s new creation, would not have survived and flourished. Without the shepherds and the Magi it would not have been heralded with the welcome that the Messiah deserved.
Fourth Week of Advent
What light-seeds and joy-seeds have been planted in your life this Advent season? Hopefully this Advent season has planted divine seeds in us, too. That seed planted in Mary’s womb 2,000 years ago has already matured, died and produced millions of seeds that have now been planted in us. But are they planted in good heart-soil? The Advent story places tremendous responsibility on us to protect and nurture the seeds of hope and joy, of justice and peace that God has planted within us by preparing and enriching the heart-soil in which they are planted. Much to ponder as I looked at my flourishing narcissus bulbs – the Advent wreath looks quite drab without these hope giving signs of life.
Who have we enlisted to help protect and nurture the seed? Who do we hope will herald the seeds with joy and welcome?
2020 has been a hard year for all of us and has left many of us feeling that the soil of our hearts and our souls is depleted. Some feel that it is barren and, to be honest, these last couple of weeks have been really hard for me and I certainly am aware of the depletion that the stresses of 2020 have brought. So what am I doing to prepare my heart-soil, and what do you think you should be doing?
I have recruited those whom I know will help me build up the soil in the ways it needs to be so that the seeds God is planting will be as productive as possible in the coming year. My anam cara – a good friend with whom I have shared much joy and heartache over the last 40 years – is my first go-to person. There are other friends, too, that I am recruiting as well as a circle of collaborators who I know will help keep me on the right track in my ministry. Perhaps you have a similar friend or a spiritual director you can enlist to help you enrich the soil of your heart over the next few weeks.
I am preparing for a spiritual retreat. This is something that I do every year after Christmas, but this year, I think it is more important than ever, so important, that I am planning to hold a webinar mid-January, so that you too can enter into a process of retreat and discernment with me. I am also pondering my three pieces of advice to myself from my last retreat in August –
- Be self-aware and tend to my self-care. For me, this requires a balance of physical, spiritual and emotional care. My contemplative times in the morning, my awe and wonder walks, and regular physical exercise are all elements that contribute to my self-care.
- Name the tensions. What destroys my sense of wonder and how do I adjust? When I am distracted, what do I have trouble naming and how does this lack of self-awareness make me vulnerable?
- Follow the stirrings. Be attentive to what your life says, maintain your freedom, enjoy God – only a few words but so much expressed in them. My attentiveness to my life can come through books that I read, people I speak to, imaginings that stir in my mind. It’s an exciting process but I sometimes think it isn’t one for the faint hearted. This discernment really is a way of life and we need to take it seriously every step of the way, painting the flexibility and resilience that it demands of us.
I am rereading my favourite books on discernment – Discernment by Henri Nouwen and The Way of Discernment by Elizabeth Liebert that are my constant companions in a discernment process. If these do not appeal to you, check out our The Art of Discernment Resource List for other possibilities.
So as Advent draws to a close and we prepare to celebrate both the birth of Christ and the ways that Christ is birthed in us during this season, how are you preparing your heart-soil so that the light-seeds and the joy-seeds God is planting will be most effective in the coming year?
I just love outdoor festive lights. There is something about them twinkling in the darkness of winter days, when the earth seems to be sleeping and the new life of spring seems so far away. Two years ago, I persuaded my husband to leave them in place, because although the days had become longer, driving home from late meetings they made for such a cheerful homecoming. Which was fine until a bout of over-enthusiastic pruning saw me accidentally cut through the wires, and the lights were no more.
This year, with all the trauma and uncertainty, which has been its tragic hallmark, I wanted the lights to return. They did, until a local fox, seeing the food bag in which I had protectively enfolded the batteries and assuming it held – well, food – chewed through the wires. Back to square one. We bought more, managed to mend the first set, and not only restored the lights but doubled them.
These lights are only tiny, but they make a huge difference, a tangible reminder that ‘the Life-Light blazed out of the darkness, the darkness couldn’t put it out’ (John 1:5, The Message). Sometimes they become obscured by a falling leaf, but the others still shine. Yet if one becomes totally disconnected, the others too may fail, a reminder of the interconnectedness which is both reassuring and challenging. It is something we are even more aware of as we wear our protective masks or pay the price of physical distance to protect those we love. It does mean that if for a season, for whatever reason, my inner light is dimmed, I can trust others to shine for that season.
There are so many dark places, in the world where injustice, poverty and violence can threaten to overcome the light, and sometimes in our own internal worlds whether through our own actions and inherent selfishness or from the woundedness over which we have no control. Yet, still the One who brought light from formless dark chaos comes, offering with grace to shed light in the darkest of places, and reminding us that one day, when all is made right, God the Master will be all the light we need. (Revelation 22, The Message).
Until that day comes, we lean into the light when and where we find it, and hold on to hope for ourselves and others that it will indeed never be overcome.
Christmas is quickly approaching but we don’t want to miss this last week of Advent. Take time to breathe, relax and enter the silence of this beautiful taize style contemplative service. A big thank you to St Andrews Episcopal Church in Seattle for allowing me to post this.
A contemplative service with music in the style-of-Taize for the Fourth Sunday of Advent. Carrie Grace Littauer, prayer leader, with music by Kester Limner and Andy Myers.
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-710-756 with additional notes below.
“Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus” – was written for The University Of Notre Dame Folk Choir by Steven C. Warner, released on the album “Prophets of Joy.” Copyright 1996 World Library Publications.
“Nada Te Turbe” and “In the Lord” are songs from the Taize community. Copyright and all rights reserved by GIA/Les Presses de Taizé.
“Kyrie for December 20” – music by Kester Limner and Andy Myers, text by Kester Limner, shared under the Creative Commons License, Attribution (CC-BY)
“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” is a metrical paraphrase of the plainchant “O Antiphons” that come from the antiphons before the Magnificat during evening prayer on December 17-24). This translation is from John Mason Neale, 1861. Public domain.
www.saintandrewsseattle.org
Wishing You a Joyous Christmas & a 2021 Filled with Opportunity for Compassionate Change-making!
Greetings in the midst of a very different Advent with a very different Christmas looming on the horizon. It has been a strange and challenging year, but in the midst of the heartbreak, we have still found much to give thanks for and as I watched the first vaccine shots being given this week, I realized that it is also a Christmas filled with much hope.
We have never appreciated the joys of community more than we have this year. Tom and I have been well supported both by those who live in the Mustard Seed House and by our next door neighbours who have faithfully shopped for us each week.
We are also grateful for the ability to keep connected to friends and family via Zoom and for Christine, there has been much joy in launching my first online courses, something that has been a dream in my heart for many years. Lean Towards the Light in Advent & Christmas has been another blessing. We are all craving light this year, and this devotional obviously hit a chord that has ministered to many. The Gift of Wonder has also continued to bring joy and I have been told that it is in many ways a book for such a time as this, as it has helped to sustain peoples’ spirits through the challenging times.
2020s Foresight: Three Vital Practices for Thriving in a Decade of Accelerating Change is a timely new book that Tom has just published with his good friend, Dwight Friesen, who teaches at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. Take a look and visit our webinar: 2021 R U Ready? on www.newchangemakers.com. Welcome your feedback.
Many of us that have been house-bound are looking forward to discovering what a new normal will look like. As Tom describes in 2020s Foresight, we need to remember that an alarming number of our neighbors don’t have enough food to feed their families as well as the growing possibility of the eviction of their families because of the COVID-19 Recession.
Above all, 2021 is an opportunity for us all to reach out locally and globally in Jesus’ name. We survived our last major global crisis, during WWII, by people in the US pulling together regardless of their political affiliation. To defeat this COVID-19 pandemic and recession as quickly as possible, we need to do the same.
We urge people of all political views to support President Joe Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris and their team in order to both defeat COVID-19 and turn our economy around. Christine and I join those wearing masks, social distancing, and receiving the vaccine when it becomes available. Perhaps our concern for protecting the lives of friends and neighbors will motivate us to defeat COVID-19 as one mutually supportive community!
Since Thanksgiving became such a serious spreader event, we also urge people to consider having a virtual Christmas gathering. We had a virtual thanksgiving with Christine’s nephew and niece in Australia by way of Zoom and we will be Zooming at Christmas, too. Give it a try.
Christine and I wish you and yours a joyous and blessed Christmas and pray that we all find ways to reach out to at-risk families not only during the holidays but in the new year as well.
God bless you as we all join together to defeat the COVID-19 pandemic and care for neighbors in serious need.
Tom, Christine & Goldie
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