All through this last Sunday of Advent, CBC Radio has been filling my home with music. The music has come live from Oslo, Prague, London, Helsinki, Austria and Germany. Though Peter Tagny has been there all day offering translation of the commentary, much of the music has been sung in languages I cannot understand. Yet the emotion and something deeper, more primal, is as clear as winter air. The music expresses the longing of our human hearts for hope in this time of darkness, for love, for assurance that life holds beauty and grace. As I listened, I thought of Iceland, bankrupt. London, freezing. Yet the music continues. Yesterday, I heard John Komura Parker speak of playing Beethoven's "Emperor" in Sarajevo, in the 1990's. An old woman approached him afterwards to say, "While I listened, I forgot about the war. "
Advent prepares us for Christmas by helping us to remember. The longings of our heart are not in vain. There is love, and reason to hope. As Yvone Gebara has written: Jesus comes from here: from this earth, this body, this flesh, from the evolutionary process that is present both yesterday and today in the Sacred Body within which love resides. It continues in him beyond that, and is turned into passion for life, into mercy and justice.
May your Christmas be joyful and may your hopes be great. May you embody in your life the love we long for, and know yourself to be held in a love deeper than even music can express.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Rose in Advent
This third Sunday of Advent is the day when the rose candle is lighted in the former penitential purple colour scheme. Rose suits this third week as Christmas comes near enough to touch. Already we have had gatherings of friends, been serenaded with the music of Christmas, even amazingly in a crowded mall in Welland when a seemingly spontaneous chorus of Handel's Messiah rose to astonish and delight unsuspecting shoppers.
By Rose Sunday, each year, my inner Scrooge collapses. The part of me that says humbug when the first Christmas decorations appear before Halloween, has again given into the delights of beauty and celebration, the anticipation that the depth of winter darkness is about to be overturned with the Solstice dawn.
Yesterday, I gathered with a group of women for a day of Retreat. We spoke about the way that darkness each year calls us into quiet, into waiting, into deepening of the yearning for new life, in our hearts, our circle of family and friends, our planet. We reflected on the truth that we are called as co-creators of this newness, as surely as Mary was called to birth the Child of Light and Hope.
Christmas is far more than a memory of a story of long ago. It is a patterning for our lives, for our work of birthing newness in the way that is unique to each of us. Far from saying humbug to our childhood yearnings for Christmas, we are to ask for more, much more:
for fulness of life for ourselves, for those we love, for the earth and all that lives upon her.
Let the longing begin on this Rose Sunday. Let it be strong enough, deep enough, bold enough that together we may give birth to the new life that is the heart of Christmas.
By Rose Sunday, each year, my inner Scrooge collapses. The part of me that says humbug when the first Christmas decorations appear before Halloween, has again given into the delights of beauty and celebration, the anticipation that the depth of winter darkness is about to be overturned with the Solstice dawn.
Yesterday, I gathered with a group of women for a day of Retreat. We spoke about the way that darkness each year calls us into quiet, into waiting, into deepening of the yearning for new life, in our hearts, our circle of family and friends, our planet. We reflected on the truth that we are called as co-creators of this newness, as surely as Mary was called to birth the Child of Light and Hope.
Christmas is far more than a memory of a story of long ago. It is a patterning for our lives, for our work of birthing newness in the way that is unique to each of us. Far from saying humbug to our childhood yearnings for Christmas, we are to ask for more, much more:
for fulness of life for ourselves, for those we love, for the earth and all that lives upon her.
Let the longing begin on this Rose Sunday. Let it be strong enough, deep enough, bold enough that together we may give birth to the new life that is the heart of Christmas.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
The Darkening of Advent
On Advent's first Sunday, the earth was still green with memories of summer, the green pines I brought indoors for the Advent wreath held hope, the fragrance of promise. Soon after I wrote my first Advent blog, green descended to grey, then into black with each earlier night. Advent Darkness rose up from the depths, engulfed me. Transition. The early Celts understood this so well, this dark time which they called the feminine time, when contemplation, stillness, waiting overtake the bright sun's call to activity. One evening I read some words of Rilke: All creation holds its breath listening within me, because to hear you, I keep silent. I made the crossing over, fell in love again with the darkness that yearly draws us into the womb where new life is being woven. Again Rilke: Let this darkness be the bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. The Celtic Christians awaited the new birth of the sun at Solstice as they awaited the Christmas celebration of the dawn of light and love among us. And we know what they could only intuit: the universe was birthed out of darkness, and to this day remains 96% in a darkness that holds all in place. We are most deeply at home in darkness, held, and created anew by the love that moves the sun and all the stars. Sink into this welcoming dark, and light the second Advent candle.
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