“We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole
landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here.
Then we can at least wail the right question into the
swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the
proper praise.” – Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
* December 2014 *
Dear friends,
I wanted to share a little introduction to the Advent
reader you have in your hands. Four years ago, one of my
dear friends Brittany Callender put together a lovely Advent
reader for some of us which included a beautiful collection of
poetry and prose, secular and spiritual writings. It turned out
to be a wonderful treat to share together some creative
thoughts as we pondered the coming of Christmas. In 2011, I
picked up the torch & put together a new edition of the
reader, offering some of my own favorite passages that
kindled ideas of waiting, longing, & expectation. The
following year I synthesized excerpts from the prior two
years to create a 2012 edition, which also supplemented the
original Advent readings with additional selections for
Christmastide. This year I am essentially simply reprinting
the 2012 version with a few new additions and minor edits.
Neither Brittany nor I added in any of our own commentary,
but rather simply offered the words of others with a prayer
that they might stir new thoughts on the Advent season
within the hearts and minds of those who came across the
collection.
Having not grown up with an understanding of Advent
(other than chocolate-candy countdowns to Christmas), my
explorations of the heritage and traditions of this time in the
Christian calendar have quickly made this one of my favorite
seasons in our Church’s liturgy. Advent means simply
“arrival”, and the idea of waiting in the dark & cold of winter
for a new revelation of Life is a theme that I think many of us
increasingly relate to as we strain to see the beginnings of
the Kingdom breaking into our world of despair, brokenness,
war, and chaos. Advent is historically marked in many
Protestant churches by celebrating the month leading up to
Christmas with reflections on four themes: hope, peace, joy,
& love. Various streams of Christianity celebrate these four
themes in different orders – I have chosen to observe them in
the sequence I have simply because it was the order I was
most familiar with.
You will note that the entries are numbered to align with
the calendar days of 2014. Thus this first volume contains
readings on hope and peace, covering the first two weeks of
Advent from Nov. 30th through Dec. 13th. The second volume
contains readings on joy and love, covering the third and
forth weeks in the season… plus readings for Christmastide.
My prayer is that these random bits of literature,
Scripture, songs, and poems will stir thoughts for
contemplation and encourage each of you in your affections
for Christ and love for the world around us.
Happy Advent!
Love & grace,
Emily Ling
for the world's more full of weeping
than you can understand...
w. b. yeats
“Long lay the world
30
in sin and error pining…”
In a few days Advent starts. To us who use our missals
every day it is the beginning of the new year. It always
makes me happy – beginnings – the opportunity
constantly to make fresh starts.
dorthy day, 1939
A voice of one who cries: Prepare in the wilderness
the way of the Lord [clear away the obstacles]; make
straight and smooth in the desert a highway for our
God!
isaiah 40:3
Come away, O human child!
to the waters and the wild
with a faery, hand in hand,
1
I will give you the treasures of darkness,
and riches hidden in secret places,
so that you may know that it is I, the LORD,
the God of Israel, who call you by your name.
isaiah 45:3
For now, it is enough to say that “darkness” is
shorthand for anything that scares me—that I want no
part of—either because I am sure that I do not have
the resources to survive it or because I do not want to
find out. The absence of God is in there, along with the
fear of dementia and the loss of those nearest and
dearest to me. So is the melting of polar ice caps, the
suffering of children, and the nagging question of what
it will feel like to die. If I had my way, I would eliminate
everything from chronic back pain to the fear of the
devil from my life and the lives of those I love—if I
could just find the right night-lights to leave on.
At least I think I would. The problem is this: when,
despite all my best efforts, the lights have gone off in
my life (literally or figuratively, take your pick),
plunging me into the kind of darkness that turns my
knees to water, nonetheless I have not died. The
monsters have not dragged me out of bed and taken
me back to their lair. The witches have not turned me
into a bat. Instead, I have learned things in the dark
that I could never have learned in the light, things that
have saved my life over and over again, so that there is
really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as
much as I need light.
barbara brown taylor, learning to walk in the dark
2
Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if
you just show up and try to do the right thing, the
dawn will come.
anne lamott, bird by bird
Hope is what this community must do because it is
God’s community invited to be in God’s pilgrimage...
Of course prophetic hope easily lends itself to
distortion. It can be made so grandiose that it does not
touch reality; it can be trivialized so that it does not
impact reality; it can be “bread and circuses” so that it
only supports and abets the general despair. But a
prophet has another purpose in bringing hope to
public expression, and that is to return the community
to its single referent, the sovereign faithfulness of God.
It is only that return that enables a rejection of the
closed world of royal definition. Only a move from a
managed world to a world of spoken and heard
faithfulness permits hope. It is that overriding focus
that places Israel in a new situation and that reshapes
exile, not as an external fate but as the place where
hope can most amazingly appear…
It is likely that the only measure of faithfulness is that
hope always comes after grief and that the speaker of
this public expression must know and be a part of the
anguish that permits hope. Hope expressed without
knowledge of and participation in grief is likely to be
false hope that does not reach despair. Thus, it is
precisely those who know death most painfully who
can speak hope most vigorously.
walter brueggeman, the prophetic imagination
‘He will wipe the tears from all faces.’ It takes
Most of us think of waiting as something very
nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is
exactly what will be required.
passive, a hopeless state determined by events totally
out of our hands. It is not difficult to understand the
irritation people feel when somebody says, ‘Just wait.’
Words like that seem to push us into passivity.
But there is none of this passivity in scripture. Those
who are waiting are waiting very actively. They know
that what they are waiting for is growing from the
ground on which they are standing. That’s the secret.
The secret of waiting is the faith that the seed has
been planted, that something has begun. Active
waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in
the conviction that something is happening where you
are and that you want to be present to it. A waiting
person is someone who is present to the moment, who
believes that this moment is the moment.
marilynne robinson, gilead
3
Every gardener knows that under the cloak of winter
lies a miracle ...
a seed waiting to sprout, a bulb opening to the light, a
bud straining to unfurl.
And the anticipation nurtures our dream.
henri nouwen
barbara winkler
4
Then a shoot will spring from the stem of Jesse,
And a branch from his roots will bear fruit.
isaiah 11:1
I believe that this life is not all; neither the beginning
nor the end. I believe while I tremble; I trust while I
weep.
charlotte bronte, villette
I believe that the Bible as a whole tends toward a
tenacious but severely chastened hope.
Once used to live and love, long and aspire, -Oh, be thou then the first, the one thou art;
Be thou the calling, before all answering love,
And in me wake hope, fear, boundless desire.
ellen davis, scripture, culture, & agriculture
george macdonald, the diary of an old soul
And you shall know [with an acquaintance and
understanding based on and grounded in personal
experience] that I am the Lord; for they shall not be put
to shame who wait for, look for, hope for, and expect
Me.
isaiah 49:23
If to myself – “God sometimes interferes” –
I said, my faith at once would be struck blind.
I see him all in all, the lifting mind,
Or nowhere in the vacant miles and years.
A love he is that watches and that hears,
Or but a mist that fumes from minds of men,
Whose fear and hope reach out beyond their ken.
When I no more can stir my soul to move,
And life is but the ashes of a fire;
When I can but remember that my heart
5
As midnight inevitably came and went without the
horsemen of the apocalypse making an appearance,
Clara surprised herself by falling into a melancholy. For
ridding herself of faith is like boiling seawater to
retrieve salt—something is gained but something is
lost. Though her friends clapped her on the back and
congratulated her for exorcising those fervid dreams of
perdition and redemption, Clara quietly mourned the
warmer touch she had waited for these 19 years, the
all-enveloping bear hug of the Savior, the One who was
Alpha and Omega, both the beginning and the end; the
man who was meant to take her away from all this,
from the listless reality of life in a ground-floor flat in
Lambeth. What now for Clara?...She still wished for a
savior. She still wished for a man to whisk her away, to
choose her above others so that she might 'walk in
white with Him; for she was worthy.' Revelation 3:4
6
zadie smith, white teeth
There was no difficulty in picking out the two stars
Our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with
something in the universe from which we now feel cut
off, to be on the inside of some door which we have
always seen from the outside, is not mere neurotic
fantasy, but the truest index of our real situation.
c.s. lewis
Hope is proportionate to detachment. It brings our
souls into the state of the most perfect detachment. In
doing so, it restores all values by setting them in their
right order. Hope empties our hands in order that we
may work with them. It shows us that we have
something to work for, and teaches us how to work for
it. Without hope, our faith gives us only an
acquaintance with God. Without love and hope, faith
only knows Him as a stranger. For hope casts us into the
arms of His mercy and of His providence. If we hope in
Him, we will not only come to know that He is merciful
but we will experience His mercy in our own lives.
thomas merton, no man is an island
they had come to see. They hung rather low in the
southern sky, almost as bright as two little moons and
very close together.
“Are they going to have a collision?” [Caspian] asked in
an awestruck voice.
"Nay, dear Prince,'” said the doctor (and he too spoke
in a whisper). “The great lords of the upper sky know
the steps of their dance too well for that. Look well
upon them. Their meeting is fortunate and means
some great good for the sad realm of Narnia. Tarva,
the Lord of Victory, salutes Alambil, the Lady of
Peace.'' …
“The time is ripe,” said Glenstorm. “I watch the skies,
Badger, for it is mine to watch, as it is yours to
remember. Tarva and Alambil have met in the halls of
high heaven, and on earth a son of Adam has once
more arisen.”
c. s. lewis, prince caspian
After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during
the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to
Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the one who has been
born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and
have come to worship him.”
matthew 2:2
I return to you years later, gray and lovely city,
7
unchanging city
buried in the waters of the past.
I'm no longer the student
of philosophy, poetry, and curiosity,
I'm not the young poet who wrote
too many lines
and wandered in the maze
of narrow streets and illusions.
The sovereign of clocks and shadows
has touched my brow with his hand,
but still I'm guided by
a star by brightness
and only brightness
can undo or save me.
During one of these conversations, the camel driver
told of his own life…
“We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it’s our
life or our possessions and property. But this fear
evaporates when we understand that our life stories
and the history of the world were written by the same
hand.”
paulo coelho, the alchemist
Why do you not think of him as the coming one,
adam zagajewski, eternal enemies
imminent from all eternity, the future one, the final
fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What keeps you
from projecting his birth into times that are in process
of becoming, and living your life like a painful and
beautiful day in the history of a great gestation? For do
you not see how everything that happens keeps on
being a beginning, and could it not be His beginning,
since beginning is in itself always so beautiful? If he is
the most perfect, must not the lesser be before him, so
that he can choose himself out of fullness and
overflow? – Must he not be the last, in order to
encompass everything within himself, and what
meaning would we have if he, whom we long for, had
already been?...
Is there anything that can take from you the hope of
thus some day being in him, the farthest, the ultimate?
Celebrate Christmas, dear Mr. Kappus, in this devout
feeling that perhaps He needs this very fear of life from
you in order to begin; these very days of your
transition are perhaps the time when everything in you
in working at him, as you have already once, in
childhood, breathlessly worked at him. Be patient and
without resentment and think that the least we can do
is to make his becoming not more difficult for him than
the earth makes it for the spring when it wants to
come.
rainer maria rilke, letters to a young poet
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and his name will be called Wonderful
Counselor,
Mighty God,
Everlasting Father,
Prince of Peace.
isaiah 9:6
8
Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that
what they were playing was the blues. He hit
something in all of them, he hit something in me,
myself, and the music tightened and deepened,
apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to
tell us what the blues were all about. They were not
about anything very new. He and his boys up there
were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction,
madness, and death, in order to find new ways to
make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer,
and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is
never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any
other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this
darkness. And this tale, according to the face, that
body, those strong hands on those strings, has another
aspect in every country, and a new depth in every
generation.
james baldwin, sonny’s blues
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
rainer maria rilke
For this God is our God for ever and ever;
He will be our guide even to the end.
psalms 48:14
God speaks to each of us as He makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
9
The memories which peaceful country scenes call up,
are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and hopes.
Their gentle influence may teach us how to weave
fresh garlands for the graves of those we loved: may
purify our thoughts, and bear down before it old
enmity and hatred; but beneath all this, there lingers,
in the least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed
consciousness of having held such feelings long before,
in some remote and distant time, which calls up
solemn thoughts of distant times to come, and bends
down pride and worldliness beneath it.
charles dickens, oliver twist
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
10
When the mood of autumn comes over me, it is
always characterized by a kind of nostalgia for
something I have never really known, as if I possess
some vestigial memory of a lost knowledge or emotion
that flits maddeningly and elusively on the edge of my
ability to recall directly. It’s truly a numinous
experience, that is, an experience that makes me feel
as I’ve come into brief contact with some sort of
transcendent spiritual truth. It tends to generate the
impression of an absolute, unmediated experience of
supernal beauty hovering just beyond the edge of my
inner grasp. All the flickering hints of this beauty that I
sometimes encounter in literature, film, music, and
scenic natural vistas and skyscapes, seem to reach
their apotheosis in this ungraspable ultimacy, as if they
are merely finite carriers that filter and refract partial
glimpses of an infinite reality.
matt cardin
Have courage for the great sorrows of life and
patience for the small ones;
and when you have laboriously accomplished your
daily task,
go to sleep in peace.
God is awake.
victor hugo
I lie down and sleep;
I wake again,
because the Lord sustains me.
psalm 3:5
He has made everything beautiful in its time.
He has also set eternity in the hearts of men;
yet they cannot fathom what God has done from
beginning to end.
ecclesiastes 3: 1
And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men."
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep.
"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep!
The wrong shall fail,
The right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men!"
henry wadsworth longfellow
at him… he was so big, so glad, and so real, that they
all became quite still. They felt very glad, but also
solemn.
“I’ve come at last,” said he. “She has kept me out for a
long time, but I have got in at last. Aslan is on the
move. The witch’s magic is weakening.”
And Lucy felt that deep shiver of gladness that you only
get if you are being solemn and still.
11
"The White Witch?" said Edmund; "who's she?"
"She is a perfectly terrible person," said Lucy. "She calls
herself the Queen of Narnia though she has no right to
be queen at all, and all the Fauns and Dryands and
Naiads and Dwarfs and Animals—at least all the good
ones—simply hate her. And she can turn people into
stone and do all kinds of horrible things. And she has
made a magic so that it is always winter in Narnia—
always winter, but it never gets to Christmas.”
. . . (later the children meet Father Christmas) …
He was a huge man in a bright red robe (bright as holly
berries) with a hood that had fur inside it and a great
white beard that fell like a foamy waterfall over his
chest. . . Now that the children actually stood looking
c.s. lewis, the lion, the witch, & the wardrobe
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron
feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
wendell berry, “the peace of wild things”
The fruit of righteousness will be peace;
The effect of righteousness will be quietness and
confidence forever.
isaiah 32:17
12
There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.
For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.
A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.
This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.
To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
g.k. chesterton
All of life is a coming home. Salesmen, secretaries,
coal miners, beekeepers, sword swallowers-- all of us.
All the restless hearts of the world... all trying to find a
way home. It's hard to describe what I felt like then.
Picture yourself walking for days in a driving snow.
You don't even know you're walking in circles-the heaviness of your legs in the drifts; your shouts
disappearing into the wind. How small you can feel.
How far away home can be.
will go out from Jerusalem.
The Lord will mediate between nations and will settle
international disputes.
They will hammer their swords into plowshares and
their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will no longer fight against nation, nor train for
war anymore.
Come, O house of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the
Lord.
Home. The dictionary defines it as both a place of
origin... and a goal or destination.
isaiah 2:1-5
patch adams
13
This is a vision that Isaiah son of Amoz saw
concerning Judah and Jerusalem:
In the last days, the mountain of the Lord’s house will
be the highest of all—
the most important place on earth.
It will be raised above the other hills and people from
all over the world will stream there to worship.
People from many nations will come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord to the
house of Jacob’s God.
There he will teach us his ways, and we will walk in his
paths.”
For the Lord’s teaching will go out from Zion; his word
Can the peace movement talk in loving speech,
showing the way for peace? I think that will depend on
whether the people in the peace movement can be
peace. Because without being peace, we cannot do
anything for peace. If we cannot smile, we cannot help
other people to smile. If we are not peaceful, then we
cannot contribute to the peace movement.
thich nhat hanh, being peace
I have told you these things, so that in me you may
have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But
take heart! I have overcome the world.
john 16:33
We shall overcome, we shall overcome,
We shall overcome someday;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall overcome someday.
The Lord will see us through,
The Lord will see us through,
The Lord will see us through someday;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall overcome someday…
The truth shall make us free,
the truth shall make us free,
The truth shall make us free someday;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
The truth shall make us free someday.
We shall live in peace, we shall live in peace,
We shall live in peace someday;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall live in peace someday.
pete seeger & zilphia horton, “we shall overcome”