Walter Brueggemann Helps Us Get Ready For Advent

Yesterday someone recommended Walter Brueggemann”s Celebrating Abundance: An Advent Devotional. Now I am a sucker for anything by Brueggemann so I was hooked. Unfortunately it is currently not available here in the U.S. as a book but I did download the kindle version and am looking forward to beginning  reading it as Tom and I travel to Pennsylvania this weekend.

Also the suggestion jogged my memory. I am a very keen Walter Brueggemann fan and last year I bought a copy of Awed To Heaven Rooted in Earth, A Collection of Poems by Walter Brueggemann.

It is a beautiful collection of poetry. This Advent prayer was my constant companion during the first week of Advent last year.  The words Give us the grace and the impatience to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes, are particularly meaningful to me as I prepare for Advent this year.

In our secret yearnings
we wait for your coming,
and in our grinding despair
we doubt that you will.
And in this privileged place
we are surrounded by witnesses who yearn more than do we
and by those who despair more deeply than do we.
Look upon your church and its pastors
in this season of hope
which runs so quickly to fatigue
and this season of yearning
which becomes so easily quarrelsome.
Give us the grace and the impatience
to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes,
to the edge of our finger tips.
We do not want our several worlds to end.
Come in your poer
and come in your weakness
in any case and make all things new.
Amen.