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.