“The spiritual Experience, whether it be of faith, hope or love, is something we cannot manufacture, but which we can only receive.”
—Philip Britts, “Yielding to God,” Watch for the Light (Plough 2001), p. 111-112.
Watch for the Light is a daily reading for Advent and Christmas by some of the best-known spiritual writers, Bonhoeffer, Dillard, Donne, Eliot, Hopkins, Kierkegaard, L’Engle, Lewis, Luther, Merton, Norris, Nouwen, Underhill, Yancy, and many others. The short essays are three to five pages long, making this an Advent and Christmas reading that will take fifteen to thirty minutes to read and digest. These daily readings allow us to spend time in our Advent meditations with some of the most beloved spiritual writers of all time. I am a significant underliner, so I went back through the book to look for the most underlined essay. It was difficult, since there were numerous underlined passages in every writing.
One favorite was the essay “Yielding to God” by the British poet Philip Britts. Britts writes that Mary’s example of “let it be with me according to your word” is the essence of the Christmas story. Jesus is conceived out of surrender, and not out of “the head of Zeus” like Athena. He is born in a lowly stable with all the animals, the cold, and the dirt. Christ was born into poverty to heal the poverty of our hearts.
Christ did not come as a moral tune-up, as a self-improvement guru or spiritual teacher. Instead, our yearly celebration of his birth reminds us that the same breakthrough can occur in our hearts today, just as “the word becoming flesh” changed the world over 2000 years ago.
Joanna. Joannaseibert.com
