Preparing for Advent: Watch for the Light

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/

Remembering December 1

Remembering December 1st, Rosa Parks Remembrance Day

“For those of you who have fallen into a level of cynicism, thinking that we “cannot” and “nothing will work,” let me tell you something about when you get up..in the morning of December first. That means nothing to you, but let me break it down because you should shout every December first. December 1 was the day … Rosa Parks sat down so you could stand up.

Rosa Parks. Peacock

When you get up this morning, you say, “God, I thank you for Rosa. That she could sit down so I could stand up.” And only God can teach you to do two things that sound contradictory at the same time, that she sat down and stood up at the same time. We must make our history sacred.”—Otis Moss III, Blue Note Preaching in a Post-Soul World: Finding Hope in an Age of Despair (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 96–97, 102.

Richard Rohr introduced us to Otis Moss and his writings about how African Americans have a unique way of holding the tension between hope and despair. In the fall of 2014, shortly after the shooting of Michael Brown and weeks of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, Rev. Dr. Moss preached about the tensions of being a Black American of faith and racism in our country.

“ Being Black means you are born with a Blues song tattooed on your heart, and at the same time, you still have a Gospel shout that is welling up in your soul about to come out.

Another way to say it is that we live with repression and revelation, simultaneously swimming in the same tributary of our spirit. There is nothing more confusing to the postmodern personality, to the millennial sojourner, than to have to exist between the strange life of dealing with your Blues and Gospel all the time: madness and ministry, chaos and Christ. My father heard an elder in Georgia say it this way. When he asked her, ‘How are you doing, Mother?’ she said, ‘I’m living between Oh Lord and Thank you, Jesus.”’

“The Gospel and the Blues,” Richard Rohr Daily Meditation, January 18, 2024.

Joanna Seibert. joannaseibert.com. https://www.joannaseibert.com/

First Sunday of Advent

 Advent 1

Guest Writer Karen Dubert

“Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness,

and put on the armour of light,

now in the time of this mortal life

in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility.”—Book of Common Prayer, Collect p. 211.

Advent One

Give us grace to cast away

the things designed to lead astray,

the things that of necessity

distract our hearts most easily,

grace to loosen and release

what makes us yearn to live at ease:

the thoughts which thoughtless hearts beset

and lead down paths of word-regret.

To cast away the works of dark

that damage soul and dim the spark

of Image faint we should reflect;

instead we manage to connect

and cling to comfort, rights and will:

ragged blankets to cover self,

words and phrases all designed

to justify “what’s mine is mine”.

I read these words on Advent One

and passed them blithely over.

What works of darkness have I done?

this prayer is for the other.

But later in the afternoon

a different light shone through them.

grace to cast away gives room

and space to welcome heaven.

Karen Dubert

Joanna Seibert.   joannaseibert.com. https://www.joannaseibert.com/