I just received Mark Pierson’s Advent in Art cards in the mail. I love these cards and the simple reflections that go with them. This year Mark has used Wayne Forte’s art. You can sign up to receive the card content weekly by email or view them online.
Expectation:
For centuries a messiah has been expected. That this saviour might be a baby, carried by a young unmarried girl and born into an obscure family and village in an occupied country was not expected. This did not meet the expectations of most people. The expected messiah; but not the messiah they expected.
Reflection:
What expectations of your were met or not met in the past year?
Offer them to God with gratitude or sadness.
What expectations do you have of this Christmas season? Or of the new year?
Offer those to God.
Ritual
Light the first candle on your Advent wreath and use it to remind you that both met and unmet expectations are part of life with God.
Advent is all about light: the absence of it and the glory of it. It is a season dear to my heart because I am a photographer who spends what seems like a lot of time waiting for the ‘right’ light, and because I have spent a fair proportion of my life in the ‘darkness’ of a chronic illness and under the pall of clinical depression.
November skies (and February skies for that matter) often seem to be characterised by a dullness, a heaviness, a flatness. The light seems stuck all day. I am learning to try to see this as ‘pearlescent’ and ‘soft’, where shadows are only hinted at, and colours can sometimes appear more ‘true’. But after years of medication this middling place is somewhere I have come to distrust, associating it with blankness and lack of sensation, with a cotton-woolled head to go with the massed banks of soft cloud.
So Advent’s revelation often seems to coincide (in the south of England that is) with clearer, brisker weather that makes my soul sing out. If I am not well enough to venture out with my camera, I return to my habit of taking pictures out of windows. Then the light around my house seems to illuminate humdrum functional objects and treat them to a twist of mystery and majesty. My eyes seem to open wider in response to the angle of the sun as it travels lower in the sky. I am no longer so intimidated by a sun that sometimes stares so balefully, revealing the flaws in everything it touches. This low sun, though capable of spilling dramatic shadows hither and thither, seems to adopt Emily Dickinson’s way of truth-telling that I have always found comforting: ‘ tell the truth/but tell it slant’.
Such angles of illumination seem a far cry from the blast of Advent glory-light that is often triumphantly used to characterise our God as Judge of all. I suspect that in our black and white blinkeredness we mistake all glory-light as harsh. We cannot look straight into its heart, true, but I wonder if it is our lack of compassion for others as well as ourselves that means most of us cannot truly imagine what a Godly love-light might feel like to our soul. Yet this message of light in the Advent story is of the ‘both now and indeed then’ kind. Incarnational light is precisely and absolutely everyday light: the ordinary, sometimes sunny, but mostly behind the clouds kind; the light that requires waiting for, in expectation of its sudden appearance, with hope. It is a sign of my own receding darkness that I am beginning to grasp (though oh so slowly) that revelations by this kind of light keep happening, whether I see them or not. My hope and prayer is that I might be given more of a glimpse, of more of those glints in God’s eyes, more often.
So perhaps the skies don’t clear, and the weather doesn’t actually change, has never really changed in December where I live. Perhaps it is rather that my Advent preoccupation with the Light makes me appreciate my everyday light differently, and remember it from year to year as a season when I might see more clearly, where my shadows are more clearly defined, and so healed; as a time when the work of Christ in me begins anew; as a prescribed period for reminding myself where and why I live. Advent is the place where I know I am a child of the Light.
Bio
Kate Kennington Steer is a writer and photographer with a deep abiding passion for contemplative photography and spirituality. She writes about these things on her shot at ten paces blog.
A beautiful reflective song to focus us for the season
Mary and Mindfulness
Kristin Carroccino
I am trying to teach my children mindfulness. In my tireless effort to teach them to “mind” me, this would seem an exercise in futility. Yet this powerful and simple connection of noticing one’s breath – one’s life force, Spirit indwelling, is the lesson I most want them to learn. To listen deeply to themselves and the great love within. To God within. Incarnation. To “come home” to themselves. And, like any good teacher learns with much practice and difficulty, one must be on the same learning path as the student; in this case, my wildly creative and precocious children.
So, we simply ring a meditation bell. A primitive wooden mallet strikes the small brass bowl, and the bell hums. We are learning to stop when we hear the bell and breathe deep, re-membering our thoughts and intentions. This is the “coming home” of this Advent I most long for. Moments will build upon moments. Three breaths will become ten and eventually a different lens with which to experience the “monkey mind” of the world that surrounds us.
I, like Mary, was great with child one Advent season. My son was delivered about a month and several thousand years after hers, and during those first years of small babies, then sweet and bumbling toddlers, I learned to know a very different Mary than the woman I had encountered in my youth. This Mary, like me, ambled slowly in the late months of the year, and when her son arrived, felt overwhelmed about what to do with this new little human (and, let’s be honest, probably a lot more overwhelmed than me given the circumstances of his conception…) As her son grew and other siblings joined the brood, she, like me, became overwhelmed with the chaos in the hut and asked the older children to go outside and play or to go see if Joseph needed any help over in the workshop.
And then, one blustery day, Mary must have discovered her own meditation bell, some way of helping the noise of the house cease upon a word or sound and slow for a few moments. She invited everyone to “come home” and feel the light radiating within. I know this must have happened, because the son that grew up to become a Rabbi was a master at producing calm in a crowd. He could quiet stormy seas, demons, the multitudes. One can’t preach what one doesn’t practice. We know from the Bible that Jesus sometimes went away, alone, to pray. The most famous prolonged recorded experience of this is just before Jesus began his public ministry, when he went into the desert to face himself.
If you’ve ever gone on a retreat, alone, for a few days, or even spent a few hours alone during the time of life when you may be surrounded by many children and their various activities, you may have experienced something similar to me: at first relief, brief contentment, then a sort of dull panic. What do I do with this time? How do I spend this time with myself? Who am I really? Who, or What is God? It doesn’t take long to get to those essential and hugely intimidating questions of life, the ones for which adventurers and seekers are often said to be climbing mountains to find gurus to provide answers.
Jesus was one of the bravest and most radical souls all those millennia ago. He walked out into the desert, into the stark quiet to face himself. He couldn’t have done that without growing up in Mary’s household. All those years spent as an infant, then child, then teenager in her Nazareth cottage led to that moment when he walked out into the wilderness alone and came back ready and on fire to love fiercely and change the world. Mary’s prayers, Mary’s meditation bells, Mary’s understanding that you have to “come home” to yourself before you can provide freedom for others.
So this Advent season, we will wait with anticipation the two comings of Christ and we will practice, in our own small and simple ways, that same coming moment by moment in each day as we come home to ourselves when we remember to breathe and stop when we hear the full, round hum of our bell. Amen.
Bio
Kristin Carroccino is a writer, editor and photographer who lives in Seattle with her husband, two children , small dog, and various snails that her daughter collects as “pets.” She volunteers for the Mustard Seed Associates and is doing her best to carve out time to sit on a meditation cushion more often. More of her writing can be found at www.boatswithoutoars.blogspot.com, a joint blog with her husband chronicling their 15,000 mile road trip in the summer of 2012 studying Episcopal churches.
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Advent has begun and I thought that it was a good time to post links to various forms of lectionary readings that you might like to consider throughout Advent, Christmas and the liturgical year. The readings vary depending on our tradition but all of them are intended to prepare us for the coming of Christ.
If you are confused by the fact that the Sunday lectionary readings that you hear in church seem to be different from those listed below in the daily readings don’t despair. There are in fact two types of lectionary readings – those that are meant to be used on a daily basis and sometimes called the daily office lectionary. These vary in format from tradition to tradition, but in the Anglican tradition provide reading from the psalms for morning and evening prayer, as well as daily OT, NT and gospel readings. This is arranged in a two year cycle beginning on the First Sunday of Advent each year. I have enjoyed using these readings for the last few years. They link Old Testament and New Testament stories and concepts and have greatly enriched my understanding of how Jesus was inspired by the Torah and other Jewish scriptures.
The lectionary for Sundays is designed for use in public services. It also begins on the First Sunday of Advent but is arranged in a three year cycle. Anyhow I thought that you might like to explore a variety of readings, many of which can be subscribed to as email subscriptions…. and of course this is but a small sampling of what is available
Readings from the Book of Common Prayer
Presbyterian USA daily readings
Readings from the Worldwide Chapel of Ease
Northumbria Community Daily Offices
Daily Prayer with the Irish Jesuits
Daily Prayer from the Catholic Church in Australia
Sacredise – Loving God/Loving the World – lectionary readings and reflections from John Van Der Laar in South Africa.
Peace Dancing
By Esther Hizsa 2013
Peace is joy resting, and joy is peace dancing.
– Charles Haddon Spurgeon
September 1998 I got a phone call from my brother. “She left me,” he said and began to cry. As he filled in the details, a new reality unfolded, and there was no folding it back to the way things were before.
“I wish you weren’t so far away,” I said wiping the tears from my cheeks.
“Me too,” he said. “I might need to call a lot.”
“That’s O.K. Call anytime,” I replied.
Once or twice a week my brother called. He’d talk and cry until he was too tired to say any more. And I’d listen, two thousand miles from his pain.
Two months after his wife left, my brother went for counseling. He told me about the sessions when he called. I listened, fascinated by what I heard. But in one conversation he asked me a question. All of a sudden it wasn’t just about him anymore.
“The counselor asked me about our childhood,” he said. “I told her I didn’t remember Mom or Dad ever holding us. Do you? Do you remember them hugging us?”
Not one memory came to mind.
“The counselor thought that was sad.”
“Hmm,” I said and looked up to see my husband pointing at his watch. “Oh, man. It’s 9:30! I’d better go or I’ll be late for work. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he said.
I grabbed my bag, kissed Fred goodbye and drove to East Vancouver through the slushy snow. At ten I arrived for my sleepover shift at a group home for developmentally disabled adults.
I pushed the phone call from my mind and went about my duties. But when I climbed into bed I thought about what my brother had said. There was no getting around it: though my parents did their best, my siblings and I did not receive the affection we longed for as children. The counselor’s validation made me weep. And once I started to weep, I couldn’t stop crying. Finally I fell asleep with a song by Rich Mullins playing in my head:
Hold me Jesus ’cause I’m shaking like a leaf
You have been King of my glory
Won’t you be my Prince of Peace?
The next morning as I helped one of the residents pick out clothes for church, she asked me if I felt better. She must have heard me crying.
Once I got home there was the usual rush getting the kids fed and out the door. We arrived at church while the congregation was singing the first verse of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” Behind us a woman came in with her family. She was carrying her four-month-old daughter in a car seat and set her down on the floor at the back of the church while she hung up her coat.
I crouched down in front of the baby and put on a smile. “I hear you’re playing baby Jesus in this year’s Christmas pageant,” I said. “Feeling up to the part?”
The baby stared back at me with ancient eyes as if she too knew I was grieving. She curled her fingers around one of mine and looked at me. At that moment I seemed as if she was holding me, as if she really was Jesus. I felt comforted.
The mom thanked me for watching her daughter and joined her family in the sanctuary. I stood there savoring the joy resting inside me.
I remember that moment as if it were yesterday; the memory is as crisp and clear as Christmas Day.
“I bring you good news of great joy,” the angel told the shepherds that first Christmas. “The Savior has been born.” The shepherds left their flocks and found baby Jesus wrapped in cloths, laying in a manger, and knelt down and worshiped him. They went home rejoicing, peace dancing in their souls.
We too rejoice for Jesus has come into our world, into our lives, and into our grief with tidings of comfort and joy.
Bio
Esther Hizsa lives in Burnaby, B.C. with her husband Fred. They have two children and two grandchildren. Esther works part time at as the associate pastor of New Life Community Church, has a Master of Divinity degree from Regent College, and is a trained spiritual director (SoulStream). But her first call is to writing. Her work been published in the MB Herald, SoulStream website and her blog, An Everyday Pilgrim http://estherhizsa.wordpress.com/.
Nativity icon
Its the first day of Advent, our anticipation is building, the nativity scenes are being assembled and our images of Jesus and his family alone and abandoned in a dirty stable are forming. But is that the way it really was?
According to New Testament theologian Kenneth Bailey in his wonderful book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, no. Middle Eastern cultures are known for their hospitality and Joseph was coming home with a new wife and an expected first child. The whole family was gathering, aunts and uncles, cousins and brothers and sisters. All of them coming home. Yes there was a census that brought them together but in a fun loving culture like this it would not have diminished the welcome or the excitement of a homecoming gathering. The expectation of a baby to be born in their midst would only have increased the excitement.
As Kenneth Bailey explains, the Greek word (katalyma or kataluma) translated as inn in Luke 2:7 does not mean a commercial building with rooms for travelers. It’s a guest space, typically the upper room of a common village home.
“A simple village home in the time of King David, up until the Second World War, in the Holy Land, had two rooms—one for guests, one for the family. The family room had an area, usually about four feet lower, for the family donkey, the family cow, and two or three sheep. They are brought in last thing at night and taken out and tied up in the courtyard first thing in the morning.
“Out of the stone floor of the living room, close to family animals, you dig mangers or make a small one out of wood for sheep. Jesus is clearly welcomed into a family home,” See the entire article here
It was to this simple village home that the shepherds and wise men alike came. Shepherds despised and regarded as unclean by their society, are visited by angels and invited to join the great home coming celebration that marks the coming of the child who will become the Messiah. That they were welcomed and not turned away from this home is remarkable. This is good news indeed for the outcast and the despised.
Then the wise men come, according to Bailey, rich men on camels, probably from Arabia. And they come not to the city of Jerusalem where the Jews thought God’s glory would shine, but to the child born in a manager around whom there is already a great light. The wise men come to find a new home, a new place of belonging that has beckoned to them across the world. This too is remarkable and good news for people of all nations who long for a place to call home.
Bailey tells us that the birth stories of Jesus “de-Zionize” the Messianic traditions. Hopes and expectations for the city of Jerusalem are fulfilled in the birth of the child Jesus. (p54).
The new family, the community that will be formed around this child, does not look to the earthly Jerusalem as its home, but to the heavenly Jerusalem which will come down from heaven as a gift of God at the end of history. (Revelation 21:1-4). And it is to this home, a place with no more tears, or oppression or starvation that all of us are beckoned by the birth of Christ.
I love this imagery. Even in the birth of Jesus we are called towards a new family and a new home. There are family and friends and animals. And special invitations by angels for the despised and rejected, and a star to guide the strangers and those who seem far off. The new family and the home envisioned in the birth of Jesus is inclusive of all accept God’s invitation.
What do you long for and which home are you awaiting this Advent season?
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