A Summertime Advent
Mindful of Christ’s Presence in the Right Here, Right Now
Advent in Buenos Aires includes celebrating Jesus’ coming and presence with an annual Christmas service centered around the Nativity with my community of faith, Iglesia Evangélica Bautista de Constitución.
I begin this reflection the week before Advent sitting on my patio enjoying a beautiful spring morning in Buenos Aires, Argentina. As Advent approaches, I am reminded how my Southern Hemisphere experience of Advent differs from the Northern Hemisphere context of winter. Many Advent reflections and themes relate Advent to the arrival of the cold and darkness that comes with winter, as well as barren trees and dying gardens. Down south we are experiencing just the opposite, as we begin to experience warmer temperatures and look forward to all that summertime has to offer. The trees are now full of green foliage and the flowers of spring are in bloom. New life is in the air.
As I think about coming home and uncovering my roots in the Advent story this year, my attention is drawn to Christ’s active presence in the here and now. In addition to celebrating Jesus’ first coming and waiting in hopeful expectation for His second coming, my desire is to remain rooted in and mindful of Christ’s presence in the midst of my life and community Buenos Aires. This includes an Advent posture that parallels the season of new life and anticipation that comes with the arrival of summer. In her book, Through the Advent Door, Jan L. Richardson says, “Perhaps the preparation and expectation to which Advent calls us are not to be found solely in the spaces we set aside during the season. Although it’s important to keep working at finding those contemplative openings in these days, perhaps Advent is what happens in the midst of all this. We enter the heart of the season, the invitation of these weeks, amid the life that is unfolding around us, with it’s wildness and wonder and upheaval and intensity.”
This year of 2013 has been my year of mindfulness. My desire is to grow and cultivate a deeper posture and ability to be present in the moment and attentive to all that is in front of me. My tendency is to spend too much time and energy either evaluating the past or worrying about the future. During Advent I hope to continue in this posture of mindfulness and attentiveness to God’s Advent coming and presence in the now. “A long loving look at the real” is how Walter J. Burghardt defines contemplation. This gets to the heart of my understanding of contemplation, mindfulness and being present in the moment. For me this means being not only mindful of Jesus’ real presence in my own life, but also attentive to Christ’s divine presence in the lives of those I share life with and encounter day-to-day this Advent season.
Father Greg Boyle of Homeboy Industries sums all this up well, “The trick is to live in the forever. And you do that by staying absolutely anchored in the present moment with the person sitting in front of you. The Christ in me recognizing the Christ in you, that’s every day, that’s every second. So you can lament what happened yesterday or you can fret about what will happen tomorrow, but this is the only moment that we have. And if you can delight in that moment and stay anchored in the duty to delight, then it works. Then kinship happens, then your listening, then you’re receiving somebody, then you’re connecting to somebody.”
As I now close this Advent reflection this first Sunday of Advent, I am savoring a fun summer Saturday shared with friends and my community of faith in Buenos Aires. We spent the day outside playing on the grass and in the pool, sharing a meal around the outdoor table and enjoying sweet moments together. I can’t think of a better way to kick-off my summer Advent season! Whether we find ourselves in summer or winter this Advent, may we cultivate and discover opportunities for being mindful and anchored in the present moment, recognizing Jesus’ presence in the midst of our daily lives and those we share it with in the right here, right now.
i. Jan L. Richardson, Through the Advent Door: Entering a Contemplative Christmas. (Orlando, FL: Wanton Gospeller Press, 2011).
ii. Walter J. Burghardt, “Contemplation: A long loving look at the real,” Church Winter 1989: 14-18.
iii. Father Greg Boyle, “The Risen Christ Reality.” Online film clip, The Work of the People
(http://www.theworkofthepeople.com/the-risen-christ-reality).
Bio
David Bayne serves among vulnerable children and youth in Buenos Aires, Argentina with Word Made Flesh (http://www.wordmadeflesh.org/). In addition to his local responsibilities, David also coordinates and facilitates formation for WMF communities around the world.
Someday he would love to write and compile a book of liturgical year reflections and prayers from a Southern Hemisphere experience. You can find David on his blog (http://wheresdavebayne.blogspot.com/) or on Twitter (https://twitter.com/davebayne).
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/.
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