Preparing for Advent: Watch for the Light
“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. I am a significant underliner, so I returned to the book to look for the most underlined essay. It was difficult since numerous underlined passages were in every piece of 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 was born in a lowly stable environment with all the animals, the cold, and the dirt. Christ was born into poverty to heal the poverty of our hearts.
Christ did not just come as a moral tune-up, self-improvement guru, or spiritual teacher. The person of Jesus was fully human but also infused with perfect God-consciousness, intimately connected to the love of God. Our yearly celebration of his birth reminds us that the same God consciousness, the presence of God within us, can break through and be born in our hearts today, just as “the word became flesh” and changed the world over 2000 years ago.
Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/