This piece was inspired during my time spent studying abroad in India after a visit to monolithic stone temples sitting on the southeast coast of India named Pancha Rathas, which were part of a 7th century port city called Mahabalipuram. As groups of tourist were walking toward the temples, I noticed two beggars: one female, one male, both crippled and elderly sitting on each side of the pathway. Based on this moment, I wrote this poem to help myself process my thoughts on poverty in India and the tension of wondering if the structure of society as it is now could ever allow for poverty to cease . But as I’ve been reflecting on what it means to observe Advent 
and wait for the coming of Christ, especially the Second Coming; I realized that though originally this piece was written specifically on the ancient pain of poverty, I think that it also uniquely illustrates that sense of waiting for redemption, for all to be made well. It is depicting that moment in between Christ’s coming which brought redeeming hope and Christ’s second coming when we will finally, fully, at last step into that redemption.
Nelson Mandela via Wikimedia Commons
Nelson Mandela former president of South Africa and Nobel Peace Prize winner, has died and the world is in mourning.
Mandela inspired countless individuals. As a small tribute I want to share some of his quotes that I find most inspiring.
1) “Difficulties break some men but make others. No axe is sharp enough to cut the soul of a sinner who keeps on trying, one armed with the hope that he will rise even in the end.”
2) “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
3) “Real leaders must be ready to sacrifice all for the freedom of their people.”
4) “A fundamental concern for others in our individual and community lives would go a long way in making the world the better place we so passionately dreamt of.”
5) “Everyone can rise above their circumstances and achieve success if they are dedicated to and passionate about what they do.”
6) “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”
7) “For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
Also I was sent this link Nelson Mandela – Prisoner, Rooftop Food Gardener which my gardening friends might find interesting as a different type of tribute to Mandela.
Lord Jesus,
Master of both the light and the darkness,
send your Holy Spirit upon our preparations for Christmas.
We who have so much to do seek quiet spaces to hear your voice each day.
We who are anxious over many things look forward to your coming among us.
We who are blessed in so many ways long for the complete joy of your kingdom.
We whose hearts are heavy seek the joy of your presence.
We are your people, walking in darkness, yet seeking the light.
To you we say, “Come Lord Jesus!”
—Henri J.M. Nouwen
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
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