…yea, thou art now Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother, Thou hast light in dark, and shutt’st in little room Immensity, cloister’d in thy dear womb. ~John Donne from “Annunciation”
Christ, whose glory fills the skies, Christ, the true, the only Light, Sun of Righteousness, arise, Triumph o’er the shades of night; Dayspring from on high, be near; Day-star, in my heart appear.
Dark and cheerless is the morn Unaccompanied by Thee; Joyless is the day’s return Till Thy mercy’s beams I see; Till they inward light impart, Glad my eyes, and warm my heart.
Visit then this soul of mine, Pierce the gloom of sin and grief; Fill me, Radiancy divine, Scatter all my unbelief; More and more Thyself display, Shining to the perfect day. ~Charles Wesley “Christ, whose glory fills the skies”
It seems impossible that God could be contained within a womb. The Creator, who made the heavens, went inward into His vast universe of atoms and sub-atomic particles. He hosted tiny cellular nuclei within His body, instead of the heaven-flung massive nebulae in distant galaxies.
And He chose to do this. Out of His love and goodness, He became Light in the darkest space of the human body, to be birthed to illuminate a world bent on destruction.
From radiance to ribosomes, from cosmos to cytoplasm, from galaxies to Golgi apparatus, from moons to mitochondria, from utter darkness to “let there be light.”
And there is Light. God is there, coming from above and coming from within.
Advent 2023 theme …because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. Luke 1: 78-79 from Zechariah’s Song
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Advent 2023 theme …because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. Luke 1: 78-79 from Zechariah’s Song
When the miracle happened it was not with bright light or fire— but a farm door with the thick smell of sheep and a wind tugging at the shutters.
There was no sign the world had changed for ever or that God had taken place; just a child crying softly in a corner, and the door open, for those who came to find. ~Kenneth Steven “Nativity”
This Advent, I’m trying not to be scared of the dark. ~James K.A. Smith from “Waiting” (Image Journal)
Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. ~Frederich Buechner from Beyond Words
It is as if there is an echo reverberating in the first two chapters of Luke. Three different times, a messenger angel appears out of the blue, saying “do not be afraid.” Zechariah had been “startled and gripped with fear,” Mary was “troubled and wondered at his words” and the shepherds were “terrified.”
Yet the first words directly from heaven were “fear not.”
My first reaction would be: there must be plenty to fear if I’m being told not to be afraid. And this world can be a terrifying place, especially in the dark.
So it is up to us, overwhelmed by the darkness of these times, to seek out the door that has been opened a bit, where light is spilling out. We have been invited, troubled and doubtful, to come see what is inside.
Advent 2023 theme …because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. Luke 1: 78-79 from Zechariah’s Song
Chorus: O come, divine Messiah! The world in silence waits the day When hope shall sing its triumph And sadness flee away
Dear Savior, haste Come, come to earth Dispel the night and show your face And bid us hail the dawn of grace
O Christ, whom nations sigh for Whom priest and prophet long foretold Come break the captive fetters Redeem the long-lost fold
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There are several attitudes towards Christmas, Some of which we may disregard: The social, the torpid, the patently commercial, The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight), And the childish – which is not that of the child For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree Is not only a decoration, but an angel.
The child wonders at the Christmas Tree: Let him continue in the spirit of wonder At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext; So that the glittering rapture, the amazement Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree, So that the surprises, delight in new possessions (Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell), The expectation of the goose or turkey And the expected awe on its appearance,
So that the reverence and the gaiety May not be forgotten in later experience, In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium, The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure, Or in the piety of the convert Which may be tainted with a self-conceit Displeasing to God and disrespectful to children (And here I remember also with gratitude St.Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire):
So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas (By “eightieth” meaning whichever is last) The accumulated memories of annual emotion May be concentrated into a great joy Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion When fear came upon every soul: Because the beginning shall remind us of the end And the first coming of the second coming. ~T.S. Eliot “The Cultivation of Christmas Tree”
Hanging old ornaments on a fresh cut tree, I take each red glass bulb and tinfoil seraph And blow away the dust. Anyone else Would throw them out. They are so scratched and shabby.
My mother had so little joy to share She kept it in a box to hide away. But on the darkest winter nights—voilà— She opened it resplendently to shine.
How carefully she hung each thread of tinsel, Or touched each dime-store bauble with delight. Blessed by the frankincense of fragrant fir, Nothing was too little to be loved.
Why do the dead insist on bringing gifts We can’t reciprocate? We wrap her hopes Around the tree crowned with a fragile star. No holiday is holy without ghosts. ~Dana Gioia, “Tinsel, Frankincense, and Fir”
Whenthe song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart. ~Howard Thurman from The Mood of Christmas & Other Celebrations
There are plenty of ghosts hiding in the boxes of ornaments I place on our Christmas tree.
Closing my eyes, I can see my father struggling to straighten our wild cut trees from our woods, mumbling under his breath in his frustration as he lies prone under the branches. I can see my mother, tears in her eyes, arranging ornaments from her parents’ childhoods, remembering times in her childhood that were fraught and fragile.
Each memory, every scratched-up glass ball is so easily breakable, a mere symbol for the fragility of us all this time of year.
Our real work of Christmas isn’t just during these frantic weeks of Advent but lasts year-long — often very hard intensive work, not just fa-la-la-la-la and jingle bells, but badly needed labor in this broken world with its homelessness, hunger, disease, conflict, addictions, depression and pain.
Even so, we enter winter next week replete with a startling splash of orange red that paints the skies in the evenings, the stark and gorgeous snow covered peaks surrounding us during the day, the grace of bald eagles and trumpeter swans flying overhead, the heavenly lights that twinkle every night, the shining globe that circles full above us, and the loving support of the Hand that rocks us to sleep when we are wailing loud.
Once again, I prepare myself to do the real work of Christmas, acknowledging the stark reality that the labor that happened in a barn that night was only the beginning of the labor required to salvage this world begun by an infant in a manger.
We don’t need a fragrant fir, full stockings on the hearth, Christmas villages on the side table, or a star on the top of the tree to know the comfort of His care and the astounding beauty of His creation, available for us without batteries, electrical plug ins, or the need of a ladder.
The ghosts and memories of Christmas tend to pull me up from my doldrums, alive to the possibility that even I, broken and fragile, scratched and showing my age, can make a difference, in His name, all year.
Nothing is too little to be loved…even me.
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn:
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
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We think of him as safe beneath the steeple, Or cosy in a crib beside the font, But he is with a million displaced people On the long road of weariness and want. For even as we sing our final carol His family is up and on that road, Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel, Glancing behind and shouldering their load. Whilst Herod rages still from his dark tower Christ clings to Mary, fingers tightly curled, The lambs are slaughtered by the men of power, And death squads spread their curse across the world. But every Herod dies, and comes alone To stand before the Lamb upon the throne. ~Malcolm Guite “Refugee”
We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots, and executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering, and shame. In the same way all disrespect for life, all hard heartedness, all indifference, and all contempt is nothing else than killing. With just a little witty skepticism we can kill a good deal of the future in a young person. Life is waiting everywhere, the future is flowering everywhere, but we only see a small part of it and step on much of it with our feet. ~Hermann Hesse, from Vivos Voco, 1919
For centuries, too many people have had to make the choice of living (and likely dying) oppressed in the midst of conflict and war or they attempt their escape to an uncertain fate on the other side of a border, a fence, or a turbulent sea. Some are given no options and are sold into slavery, taken where their captors wish, or have been rounded up and forced to live far from their ancestral homes.
Some of us descend from people who made the difficult decision to escape war, or hunger, or oppression, or extreme poverty. We live and thrive by the grace and mercy of God to these ancestors.
This God was a refugee Himself, fleeing from a king who sought Him dead. This God knows what it is like to be hated and pursued. He knows the wrath and cruelty of His fellow man.
This God has a name, He has a face and a voice and it is He who ultimately holds our fate in His hands.
This God is not forgotten nor has He forgotten us. He will return to forever banish the darkness surrounding us.
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn:
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
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It was a time like this, War & tumult of war, a horror in the air. Hungry yawned the abyss- and yet there came the star and the child most wonderfully there.
It was time like this of fear & lust for power, license & greed and blight- and yet the Prince of bliss came into the darkest hour in quiet & silent light.
And in a time like this how celebrate his birth when all things fall apart? Ah! Wonderful it is with no room on the earth the stable is our heart. ~Madeleine L’Engle “Into the Darkest Hour” in Wintersong
Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it – because he is out of place in it, and yet must be in it – his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected because they are regarded as weak… With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst. ~Thomas Merton from Watch for the Light
The Nativity, stained glass in the Epiphany Chapel of Winchester Cathedral, UK
The Nativity by Le Nain, Antoine and Louis (d.1648) & Mathieu (1607-77)
A stable and its stone manger is sanctuary for the weary and burdened – especially when everything seems to be falling apart.
There are so many ways we continue to refuse access and shut the doors in the faces of those two (plus One) weary travelers, forcing them to look elsewhere for refuge. We say “no room” dozens of times every day, not realizing who we are shutting out.
With all the material distractions of our age, it is small wonder we pay no attention to who is waiting patiently outside the back door of our lives, where it is inhospitable and cold and dank. Few of us would invite our special company into the barn first and foremost. Yet these travelers have no access to our front door, with fancy meals and feather beds and fresh flowers on the cupboard. They are relegated to the dark and manure strewn parts of our lives. That is where He was born to dwell amid our messiness, and that is where He remains, in the humblest parts of our being, the parts we do not want to show off, and indeed, most often want to hide.
And that is, of course, a place where there is always plenty of room.
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn:
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
A stable lamp is lighted Whose glow shall wake the sky The stars shall bend their voices And every stone shall cry And every stone shall cry And straw like gold will shine A barn shall harbour heaven A stall become a shrine
This child through David’s city Will ride in triumph by The palm shall strew its branches And every stone shall cry And every stone shall cry Though heavy, dull and dumb And lie within the roadway To pave the Kingdom come
Yet He shall be forsaken And yielded up to die The sky shall groan and darken And every stone shall cry And every stone shall cry For thorny hearts of men God’s blood upon the spearhead God’s love refused again
But now as at the ending The low is lifted high The stars will bend their voices And every stone shall cry And every stone shall cry In praises of the child By whose descent among us The worlds are reconciled ~Richard Wilbur“A Christmas Hymn”
No presents, no candy, no treat No stockings hung by the fire No parties, no family to greet No angel’s heavenly choirs
Bells are ringing all over the world Bells are ringing calling the light Bells are ringing all over the world All over the world tonight
No doorways, no windows, no walls No shelter here on the ground No standing and no safe place to fall Just the promise of this distant sound
Wherever you’re walking tonight Whoever you’re waiting for Somehow by the stable’s faint light Peace in your heart is restored
Bells are ringing all over the world Bells are ringing calling the light Bells are ringing all over the world All over the world tonight ~Mary Chapin Carpenter
The congregation sang off key. The priest was rambling. The paint was peeling in the Sacristy.
A wayward pigeon, trapped in the church, flew wildly around for a while and then flew toward a stained glass window,
but it didn’t look like reality.
The ushers yawned, the dollar bills drifted lazily out of the collection baskets and a child in the front row began to cry.
Suddenly, the pigeon flew down low, swooping over the heads of the faithful like the Holy Ghost descending at Pentecost
Everyone took it to be a sign, Everyone wants so badly to believe. You can survive anything if you know that someone is looking out for you,
but the sky outside the stained glass window, doesn’t it look like home? ~June Beisch, “Holy Ghost” from Fatherless Women.
A little aside from the main road, becalmed in a last-century greyness, there is the chapel, ugly, without the appeal to the tourist to stop his car and visit it. The traffic goes by, and the river goes by, and quick shadows of clouds, too, and the chapel settles a little deeper into the grass.
But here once on an evening like this, in the darkness that was about his hearers, a preacher caught fire and burned steadily before them with a strange light, so that they saw the splendour of the barren mountains about them and sang their amens fiercely, narrow but saved in a way that men are not now. ~R.S. Thomas “The Chapel”
The church knelt heavy above us as we attended Sunday School, circled by age group and hunkered on little wood folding chairs where we gave our nickels, said our verses, heard the stories, sang the solid, swinging songs.
It could have been God above in the pews, His restless love sifting with dust from the joists. We little seeds swelled in the stone cellar, bursting to grow toward the light.
Maybe it was that I liked how, upstairs, outside, an avid sun stormed down, burning the sharp- edged shadows back to their buildings, or how the winter air knifed after the dreamy basement.
Maybe the day we learned whatever would have kept me believing I was just watching light poke from the high, small window and tilt to the floor where I could make it a gold strap on my shoe, wrap my ankle, embrace any part of me. ~Maureen Ash “Church Basement”
There is much wrong with churches overall, comprised as they are of fallen people with broken wings and fractured faith. We seem odd, keen to find flaws in one another as we crack open and spill our own.
Yet what is right with the church is who we pray to, why we sing, feast together and share His Word. We are visible people joined together as a body bloodied and bruised. Someone is looking out for us despite our thoroughly motley messiness.
Our Lord of Heaven and Earth rains down His restless love upon our heads, no matter how humble a building we worship in, or how we look or feel today.
The dove descends upon us.
We are simply grateful to be alive, to raise our hands together, to sing and kneel and bow in a house, indeed a home that God calls His own.
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn.
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
The old church leans nearby a well-worn road, Upon a hill that has no grass or tree, The winds from off the prairie now unload The dust they bring around it fitfully.
The path that leads up to the open door Is worn and grayed by many toiling feet Of us who listen to the Bible lore And once again the old-time hymns repeat.
And ev’ry Sabbath morning we are still Returning to the altar waiting there. A hush, a prayer, a pause, and voices fill The Master’s House with a triumphant air.
The old church leans awry and looks quite odd, But it is beautiful to us and God. ~Stephen Paulus
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but the whole shadowed earth reaching up, taking hold ~David Baker “Quicker”
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for? ~Robert Browning from Andrea del Sarto
My branches are bare during this season of letting go. As starkly revealed as I am, perhaps darkening days are a blessing – less spotlight on my plainness in silhouette – all knobby joints and awkward angles and curves.
One thing I know though: in this season I prefer the shadowland, yet I still reach up, trying to hold on to the promise beyond me. In fact, so many of us have kept grasping at what we know is there but cannot see, God has come down to grab on to each one — and is still hanging on to us.
We are not too plain to be lifted, welcomed, cherished as we are, into heaven’s arms.
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn.
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
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What seemed to be the end proved to be the beginning… Suddenly a wall becomes a gate. ~Henri Nouwen from A Letter of Consolation
I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear: This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.
Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees This year, nor want of rain destroy the peas.
This year time’s nature will no more defeat you, Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.
This time they will not lead you round and back To Autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.
This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell, We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.
Often deceived, yet open once again your heart, Quick, quick, quick, quick!—the gates are drawn apart. ~C.S. Lewis “What the Bird Said Early in the Year”
What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, unremembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning… ~T.S. Eliot from “Little Gidding” The Four Quartets
I expect gates in my neighborhood to be closed – in the farming business, a gate left open is an invitation to disaster. Likewise, barn doors are often locked, to keep things safe inside and leave the unwanted out.
So it is true of the heart, where my most cherished treasures are stored and protected – a lockbox of faith and love. But the Lord knocks at the locked doors and closed gates of our hearts, expecting a response. He came to earth to enter into our lives, not be kept outside waiting. From the very beginning of His life, we refused Him entry to share our comfortable inn, relegating Him to a stone trough, and at the end, a stone tomb.
A gate never opened becomes a wall. A heart that does not bleed joy and tears and sorrow becomes nothing but stone.
He has come to turn the key and we are unlocked forever.
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn.
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
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It is this great absence that is like a presence, that compels me to address it without hope of a reply. It is a room I enter
from which someone has just gone, the vestibule for the arrival of one who has not yet come. I modernise the anachronism
of my language, but he is no more here than before. Genes and molecules have no more power to call him up than the incense of the Hebrews
at their altars. My equations fail as my words do. What resources have I other than the emptiness without him of my whole being, a vacuum he may not abhor? ~R.S. Thomas “The Absence”
Advent is designed to show that the meaning of Christmas is diminished to the vanishing point if we are not willing to take a fearless inventory of the darkness. ~Fleming Rutledge from Advent- The Once & Future Coming of Jesus Christ
There is no light in the incarnation without witnessing the empty darkness that precedes His arrival; His reason for entering our world is to fill our increasing spiritual void, our hollow hearts, our growing deficit of hope and faith.
God abhors a vacuum.
We find our God most when we keenly feel His absence, hearing no reply to our prayers, our faith shaken, not knowing if such unanswered prayers are heard.
In response, He has answered. He comes to walk beside us. He comes to be present among us, to ransom us from our self-captivity by offering up Himself instead.
He fills the vacuum completely and forever.
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn.
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
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But if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with perseverance. Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Romans 8:25-27
And so many of us. How can we expect Him to keep track of which voice goes with what request. Words work their way skyward. Oh Lord, followed by petition — for a cure, the safe landing. For what is lost, missing — a spouse, a job, the final game. Complaint cloaked as need — the faster car, porcelain teeth. That so many entreaties go unanswered may say less about our lamentable inability to be heard than our inherent flawed condition.
Why else, at birth, the first sound we make, that full-throttled cry? Of want, want, want. Of never enough. Desire as embedded in us as the ancestral tug in my unconscienced dog who takes to the woods, nose to the ground, pulled far from domesticated hearth, bowl of kibble. Left behind, I go about my superior business, my daily ritual I could call prayer.
But look, this morning, in my kitchen, I’m not asking for more of anything. My husband slices bread, hums a tune from our past. Eggs spatter in a skillet. Wands of lilac I stuck in a glass by the open window wobble in a radiant and — dare I say it?— merciful light. ~Deborah Cummins “Just One God” from Counting the Waves
We who are nothingness can never be filled: Never by orchards on the blowing sea, Nor the rich foam of wheat all summer sunned.
Our hollow is deeper far than treasure can fill: Helmets of gold swim ringing in the wells Of our desire as thimbles in the sea.
Come like an ocean thundering to the moon, Drowning the sunken reef, mounting the shore. Come, infinite answer to our infinite want. ~John Frederick Nims from “Prayer”
Each morning’s sunrise, each evening’s sunset is answer to our unuttered prayers. From subtle simmer to blazing boil, settling back to gray.
And so our prayers of praise, thanksgiving, petition rise and fall, simmer and boil and are sometimes breathed in silence.
Yet our Father answers with radiance and mercy.
So we keep on trudging, with each step our prayers are answered: we will take the next step, and the next, and the next.
Never alone. Always heard. Forever loved.
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn.
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darknessand lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
O radiant Light, O Sun divine; Of God the Father’s deathless face, O image of the Light sublime that fills the heav’nly dwelling place. O Son of God, the source of life, Praise is your due by night and day. Our happy lips must raise the strain of your esteemed and splendid name.
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