Tag Archives: Advent

WHAT A CHARACTER!

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WHAT A CHARACTER! What a visionary John the Baptist appears to have been. “Skinny as a cactus” as Barbara Brown Taylor has it, and ready to stand before all-comers to present them with a haunting hunch. No. He was not the Christ. No. Not the greatest amongst the prophets, past or present. No. Not the light that was to come into the world. No. He didn’t know his name. Yes. He understood that most people had heard more messianic / apocalyptic preachers than they’d had hot dinners. No. He wouldn’t be able to hold a candle to the one who’s absolutely going to be raised up, “one who stands among you”. It’s a hunch. A haunting hunch. Not much detail yet. But an absolute assurance that what’s needed in this world, the real and radical hope for the friendless, the unheard, the dispossessed (of whom, in our time too, Archbishop Rowan has been writing in the Advent wilderness this week) – is repentance. Not a nauseating or ingratiating or formulaic “Father, forgive me for I have sinned” but repentance. Turning around. Looking at life, and at love, and the way we live, and the way we love, in a new way. John the Baptist had a prophetic hunch that what was going to be required, in future, of every anointed man, woman and child upon the face of the earth was a willingness to “walk the walk” as well, if not better, than they “talk the talk”. And people like you and me were prepared to put life and limb at great risk to go out there into the wilderness to hear that! John the Baptist wasn’t the only guy with a hunch, was he? We’ve a pretty strong sense too that what we need in our broken world is a good dunking in the Jordan. Fresh, cold water. Rise and shine. Smell the coffee. The wilderness is about to break into flower. Which wilderness? Where? Yours. In your heart, for a start. What a character! What a visionary. Who? Ah, come on! YOU …

ADVENT WITH A DIFFERENCE

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A GENEROUS FRIEND has made me a present of Bishop Stephen Cottrell’s Do Nothing Christmas Is Coming – An Advent Calendar With a Difference. I’m delighted with it. It’s inscribed:

Christmas is a busy time for me … don’t know what it must be like for you … I hope this book can make it less of a marathon and more of a celebration

I’m sure it will. And I’m immensely grateful for the kindness of the thought as well as the gift. It’s a novel thought for a cleric – Do Nothing Christmas Is Coming – another of those  biblical-sort-of metanoia moments. So I’m going to have a go :) … I wonder what others are planning for Advent? – in the sense of, really, I’d love to know …

O LORD OPEN THOU OUR LIPS

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in an English parish church in November AD 2011

ADVENT SUNDAY EVENING: O Lord, open thou our lips. And our mouth shall shew forth thy praise. O God make speed to save us. O Lord make haste to help us. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

A large congregation, and a goodly number in the Quire and Places where they sing; the hymn book, the (1662) Prayer Book, the versicles and responses, the Choir, the Psalm, the Lessons, the clouds of incense, the organ, the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis, the Apostles’ Creed, the collects, the Anthem, the prayers (for Her Majesty’s good governance amongst these), the well sung hymns, the sermon, It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old … and an evening prayer, and blessing.

“Wonderful. Wonder-full. Like a cathedral” – someone said at the door. Quite so. Like a cathedral. That’s what we aspire to. That’s what we’re reaching for. The cathedra, the seat of the Lord God Almighty. That’s why a parish church exists – seats in the heart of holiness, for everyone, and a door. The gate of Heaven. The place of

Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back … *

The place to which we lift up our eyes to seek succour and counsel, in company with praying people through ages past – the vision of which takes our minds off guarding our little piles of stuff for a while; the vision that takes our minds off wondering “what I want for Christmas” and the gold-wrapped but still fragile little securities that leave us still wanting – to notice the advent of God; to notice the gift of the Life of God in glorious, mysterious, immortal, invisible wisdom: reaching. Reaching to touch and to bless and to heal us. Advent, adventus. Come! We welcome you into your City, Lord. Come! Fulfil now, O Lord, the desires and petitions of thy servants as may be most expedient for them.

Some things in the world and in the Church of God are, quite simply, everlastingly fresh expressions.

* R S Thomas, The Kingdom

ADVENT’S ADVENT ALREADY

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ADVENT’S NEARLY UPON US again which means another whole year has upped and went! Maggi Dawn speaks of Advent’s Beginnings and Endings; Jan Richardson speaks of a door and of blessings; all of us look “for the City of Peace, in whose light we are transfigured, and the earth transformed.”

Advent: the coming of a Light by which we ourselves are first transfigured, a consequence of which is that the earth (and our view of it) becomes transformed. Beginning with transfiguration we end with transformation. 

Transfigured and transformed we discover that we have been mightily blessed by the simple event of having walked through a door into a lamplit scene of New Life; we have stumbled upon the great and mighty wonder of a young woman and a man and a baby; we have stumbled upon the breath of God streaming from the nostrils of horses, sheep and cattle, mother and father, shepherds and foreigners, rich and lowly, baby in manger bed, tired, happy, servant tenderness; the transfiguring and transforming Holy beaming in the faces of the recently very worried unwed. There’s resurrection right here in this new beginning just as surely as there’ll be resurrection come the ending.

And having walked through that door and having seen that light we know that this is our beginning and ending; we know that we are breathing Alpha and Omega; we know that all the colour of the good life shines in this scene. As gobsmacked as kings from the Orient and black-clad shepherds from the fields we recognise our deep, deep primal need for the continual transfiguring that alone transforms the world and worlds. There’s no going back. Advent. Coming. Tiny infant lungs are filled with the Very Breath of God. For me. For you. For all.

The door is open at St Michael & All Angels, Bramhall. On Advent Sunday 27th at 8am, 9am, 10.45am & again for Advent Evensong at 6.30pm.

FRIENDS CONTEMPLATING

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LOVELY TIME TODAY leading a day retreat for the Macclesfield Team Contemplative Prayer Group. The delightful Friends Meeting House in Antrobus was the well chosen venue, and the familiar ‘Quaker hospitality’ of the place, coupled with stunning, moving winter sunshine in mid-Cheshire countryside was the perfect breathing space on the eve of Advent Sunday.

Contemplation – “setting aside space to gaze at something, or someone, intently.” One of our little gathering spoke of the quietening of his heartbeat, and a general slowing of pace, for which he was patently thankful. Others spoke of similar experience.

I hear the Advent call tonight. “Sleepers wake!”, together with the encouragement of that great Quaker, Parker J Palmer, to “Let Your Life Speak”. And I’m conscious of the deep need in me, and frequently in the Church at large, to be awake and yet to be still sometimes, whilst awake. That’s contemplation. And yes, there’s much to be done in busy lives. But all that is needful is so much the better supplied when we, like Jesus before us, have set aside time and space enough, often enough, to gaze at something, or someone, intently.

Grateful thanks to new friends, and to The Society of Friends for affording us such delightful space so to do, and to my valued friend, the thoughtful Rector of Macclesfield, whose own capacity for contemplation continues to inspire and illuminate me, as surely as the blessings of winter sunshine.

STARRY NIGHT

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“WHAT IS SERIOUS TO MEN is often very trivial in the sight of God.  What in God might appear to us as “play” is perhaps what God takes the most seriously.  At any rate the Lord plays in the garden of creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear God’s call and follow in the mysterious, cosmic dance.  We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing.  When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Basho we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash — at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness,” the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness.  The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast.  The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity, and despair.  But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.  Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it or not.” – Thomas Merton

ADVENT …

GOODES AND CHATTELS

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inventory information largely drawn from Yeomen and Colliers in Telford

CHRISTMAS PRESENTS have been a subject of discussion with my parents – Robert and Irene Marsh.  “What do you want for Christmas?” – the weekend glossy magazine asks of us. And honesty requires that each of us must answer that we WANT for nothing in under-the-Christmas-Tree-terms whilst wanting a world of what Advent might bring to humankind via the still small voice of the heart.

In 1630, we discovered by way of family tree studies recently, inventory was drawn up of the entire worldly goods of our ancestor Reginald – Rennalde – Marsh, a husbandman of Stanwardine, in the parish of Baschurch, in the County of Sallop and the diosses of Lichfield, made at the time of his death so that, by the direction of Master Thomas Davies, Vicar of Ruiton, his widow might benefit from administration of the said goods being granted to her.

Two meassures seadnes sowed with rie (small fields sown); one meassure sowed partes; 3 meassures of oates sowed; one reede heaffer; one potte, one condlestick, one cubbord, table boarde and frame, a bench, a forme, one cheare and stoles; three bedsteedes, one cheste and a paynted clothe over one of the bedes; one featherbede, two bolesters, one coverlett, two winnowsheetes, two payres of sheetes; one Bowke (bucket) , one can, one stonde, one Turnell (a large oval tub used for salting meat or kneading bread), one churne and other smale Trinnen ware, one Mucke and Fofther (fodder), one axe, one spade, one potte, one plow, one payre of Iorns and one harrow; and his wearing apparrell. The whole some £5 5s and 10d

We understand that Reginald and Elienore Marsh were relatively quite well off. All the same it makes it rather difficult for us to suggest that we WANT anything for Christmas, save for that which reflection on an anointed one’s advent is really, deeply, intended to bring for every man, woman and child upon earth. Come Emmanuel. Come God with us, and in us.

PRISONERS TO RELEASE …

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First Advent and first candle is lit
Image by Per Ola Wiberg (Powi) via Flickr

ANCIENT & MODERN CONVERSATION

Come, thou long-expected Jesus, born to set thy people free; from our fears and sins release us; let us find our rest in thee.

I’m here. Stop looking for me in the clouds. What you’re looking for is inside you and at the heart of all things. Let’s have ten minutes while we forget the Christmas shopping. Look inside, love, I AM “at rest” in thee!

Israel’s strength and consolation, hope of all the earth thou art; dear desire of every nation, joy of every longing heart.

There’s not a human being on earth who’s not looking for what you’re looking for. Light to stand up in. Hope amidst suffering. Humankind and I AM are all in this together.

Born thy people to deliver; born a child and yet a king; born to reign in us for ever; now thy gracious kingdom bring.

And you were born for a greatness you’ve not dreamed of yet. Born to be anointed. Born to reign in me. And me in thee.

By thy own eternal Spirit, rule in all our hearts alone: by thy all-sufficient merit, raise us to thy glorious throne.

I will. I will. But stop looking for “the judgement” your dream-world thinks is going to come down out of your sky. I’ve heard you. You’ll find me not in “clouds descending” but in your heart. My judgement is the Love you’ll find in the depths of you. And if you’re quiet enough, often enough, you can hear me there. Your heart is my throne. Who? Who AM I talking to? Well, you, of course. The person, the people you ask me (or I ask you) to deliver. All of you and all of you.

CALLED? …

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The World's Best Sandwich!
Image by Telstar Logistics via Flickr

WITH LAST NIGHT’S MUSINGS on making a modern world still fresh in my mind it was great to have a long overdue lunch with a friend and colleague today. Great discussion about what we’re supposed to be about. About the part that we (and every other Christian individual) plays in making the modern church. We agreed about the extent to which we’re at risk of being drawn too deeply into contemporary management-speak and the numbers game: growth = numbers attending church. And this doesn’t sit lightly with either of us.

There’s something in us that hangs on to the notion that the real work we’re supposed to be engaged in is to do with ‘inner work’; with what every person is CALLED to be and to do; to do with contemplation, prayer and reflection; to do with Church in people and not just ecclesiastical buildings (of whatever variety). We’re at times so absorbed in externalising everything, the-coming-in-the-clouds-sort-of-Advent being just one example, that we miss the Advent of the Christ that’s happening even as we draw our next breath, in our hearts. We ought to have lunch more often.