Advent, Week 3
Much richness this third week of Advent to read and think about. Here are a few poems and passages from God With Us that stuck me deeply this week, plus some music I always love to listen to each year.
Noel | Anne Porter
When snow is shaken
From the balsam trees
And they're cut down
And brought into our houses
When clustered sparks
Of many-colored fire
Appear at night
In ordinary windows
We hear and sing
The customary carols
They bring us ragged miracles
And hay and candles
And flowering weeds of poetry
That are loved all the more
Because they are so common
But there are carols
That carry phrases
Of the haunting music
Of the other world
A music wild and dangerous
As a prophet's message
Or the fresh truth of children
Who though they come to us
From our own bodies
Are altogether new
With their small limbs
And birdlike voices
They look at us
With their clear eyes
And ask the piercing questions
God alone can answer.
From God With Us | Luci Shaw:
Paul gives us an astonishing understanding of waiting in the New Testament book of Romans, as rendered by Eugene Peterson, “Waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enraging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.” With such a motivation, we can wait as we sense God is indeed with us, and at work with us, as he was with Mary as the Child within her grew.
Though the protracted waiting time is often the place of distress, even disillusionment, we are counseled in the book of James to “let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete.” Pain, grief, consternation, even despair, need not diminish us. They can augment us by adding to the breadth and depth of our experience, by enriching our spectrum of light and darkness, by keeping us from impulsively jumping into action before the time is ripe, before the “fullness of time.” I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.”
You did the unthinkable
You built one bridge to us
Long enough, strong enough
to link the unlinkable.” (page 84)
Isaiah 56: 1-3, 608
1 “Maintain justice
and do what is right,
for my salvation is close at hand
and my righteousness will soon be revealed.
2 Blessed is the one who does this—
the person who holds it fast,
who keeps the Sabbath without desecrating it,
and keeps their hands from doing any evil.”
3 Let no foreigner who is bound to the Lord say,
“The Lord will surely exclude me from his people.”
And let no eunuch complain,
“I am only a dry tree.”
6 And foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord
to minister to him,
to love the name of the Lord,
and to be his servants,
all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it
and who hold fast to my covenant—
7 these I will bring to my holy mountain
and give them joy in my house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and sacrifices
will be accepted on my altar;
for my house will be called
a house of prayer for all nations.”
8 The Sovereign Lord declares—
he who gathers the exiles of Israel:
“I will gather still others to them
besides those already gathered.”
“It is in the redeeming nature of God to welcome and reclaim.” (Luci Shaw, page 93)
“Mary, Jesus’ mother, lived generatively from the moment of the Annunciation, through pregnancy and childbirth, all the way to her presence along with the disciples in the upper room of Acts 1. Because she said “ye” to both shame and glory, Jesu, offspring of Abraham and Judah and David, the flower and fruit of her womb, became the Savior of the World.” (Luci Shaw, page 96)
Dana Gioia
Hanging old ornaments on a fresh cut tree,
I take each red glass bulb and tinfoil seraph
And blow away the dust. Anyone else
Would throw them out. They are so scratched and shabby.
My mother had so little joy to share
She kept it in a box to hide away.
But on the darkest winter nights—voilà—
She opened it resplendently to shine.
How carefully she hung each thread of tinsel,
Or touched each dime-store bauble with delight.
Blessed by the frankincense of fragrant fir,
Nothing was too little to be loved.
Why do the dead insist on bringing gifts
We can’t reciprocate? We wrap her hopes
Around the tree crowned with a fragile star.
No holiday is holy without ghosts.
December 25 | Christine Perrin
On this Morning of your birth
on the edge of a North American winter i
n the blue reluctant light of dawn,
in the silence of this room
I want to make you a song,
though a city of songs have already been made
in tongues of fish and grass and blood.
It's pathetic to have this desire
and the cloud of witnesses and so many words,
and still have to ask for my lips to be opened.
I am like my father at Handel's Messiah,
singing the arias in the audience-
he querulous voice in my ear beneath
the fluent surface of the soloists-
not only the tenor part, but alto, soprano!
An impure work, but from, his own belly, lungs, throat.
