Eternal Echoes

The Holy-day(s) season...

I am not the Grinch, I don't wander around muttering Christmas Bah Humbug under my breath, but neither is my house festooned with Christmas decorations, in fact to be perfectly honest I am considering not setting up the Christmas tree this year. Don't get me wrong, I am going to celebrate but the usual Christmas trappings of tinsel and trees and fuss and bother are frankly leaving me cold. I feel the pressure, but the more pressure but the more pressure I feel the more likely I am just to resist it. I want to celebrate this season as a season of highlighted Holy-days, rather than a season of parties and rushing.

I am tired of loosing the wonder of the incarnation underneath the pressure to perform, the pressure to produce something perfect and honestly unachievable for one day, or more likely now for a series of days. One Christmas advert that has been annoying me intensley declares that "this is the season of binge". I want to sceram at it, no it isn't, this is the season when we should be pausing to remember the one who came revealing the depths of the love of God, the season for peace and wonder, not for gluttony and over-spending. I want to celebrate this season as a season of highlighted Holy-days, rather than a season of stress and overindulgence.

Again, don't get me wrong, I enjoy giving gifts but the whole thing has grown out of proportion, when a DVD becomes a stocking filler, and the main present is considered mean unless it comes in at the £100+ mark we live in a world gone mad. Why are we so content to stuff ourselves with things that do not and cannot ultimately satisfy?

Am I ranting? Well yes probably, but you see I hear stories of folk who are going hungry so they can buy this seasons must have toy for their children, of children who even in this day and age in this so called civilised country who aren't eating properly because there is not enough money to go around. I know people who live in cold damp conditions for whom Christmas lights are an impossible luxury, and I want to be able to say that the Christmas story IS GOOD NEWS for them, and I wonder how I can say that if I am preoccupied with tinsel and glitter, and worried about whether or not I can afford all of the required trimmings. I want to celebrate this season as a season of highlighted  Holy-days, to be prepared to share and to give.

So I am opting out of the pressure, but not the celebration, I want Christ to be the centre of Christmas, and I want to call out with the voice of the prophet for us to clear the way of the boulders and barriers that hide him from us, and through which we hide ourselves from him. I want to approach the story afresh, to capture the wonder and terror experienced by the Shepherds who saw and yet could not fathom the depth of what they were seeing. I want to be caught up in silent contemplation that takes me to a place beyond words and songs to the very heartbeat of God who came to give all to the world. 

The miracle is that I can tune into that heartbeat, be connected to God anywhere and everywhere, and that, that heartbeat will if I allow it slow me and steady me to another pace of life. It will temper my shopping habits, flow into my celebrations and help me find the true meaning of the wonder and joy of the season. This is a season of highlighted Holy-days and I want to savour them to the full.

Image; Light breaks through (mine)

 

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Celtic Advent- 40 days of preparation

Advent musings

Advent musings

With a head full of images of yesterdays Black Friday consumer frenzy today I am preparing for Advent Sunday. I can almost hear the cry of the prophet raised in lament over the crowds carrying TV's and jostling and shoving one another to grab the latest phone or tablet:

"Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down.

More images come to mind, the floods in Palestine, atrocities inflicted on the people of Syria and Iraq, news of Ebola victims, air strikes, deaths, famine struck refugee camps:

"Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down."

With shops full of goodies and tempting treats, with carols being played and decoration laden shelves inviting us to dive into celebrations the prophet's voice calls out again inviting us to pause, to ponder, to repent and reflect. What a curious gift this pre-Christmas season of Advent is, with its themes of longing, and lamenting,  and yet surely it is a gift that we need so much. It calls us both deep into ourselves and beyond ourselves at the same time. It calls us away from our appetites and desires to encounter God within and without, to re-focus, and to be restored.

How do we feel about the Black Friday frenzy? Could it be that if we are honest our horror is a thin mask for a secret covetousness, in a world where we are so often judged by what we own, and the latest technology is an ever expanding feast that we feel left out or left behind when we do not have what we are told we need in order to be valid and valuable? Could it be that there might be a side to ourselves that we would rather deny, it might not be about technology, maybe it is about a meal, a dress, a car, a holiday, the list can go on; I suspect that we are all tempted, and somewhere within us lurks a certain envy alongside the revulsion that Black Friday evoked.

The prophet cries out, does our soul join in: "O that you would tear open the heavens and come down...."

How do we respond to news of war, to news of disease, to news of famine and deprivation? Does it wash over us in a stream of seemingly remote events leaving us untouched. Does it sadden us momentarily, but soon pass us by, does it leave us feeling inadequate and even impotent to do anything that might make a difference? Can we join our cry to the prophets cry:

"O that you would tear open the heavens and come down..."

Our world is not what it should be, we are not what we should be, we need someone to help us, to save us, O come, O come Immanuel!

Perhaps the greatest gift of Advent is that call to reflection and preparation in which we come to recognise again our deep need of a Saviour, to save us from our small selves, our selfishnesses and sense of inadequacy. We need a Saviour to draw us beyond ourselves to capture our hearts with a vision for the world created with so much wonder. We need a Saviour to set us free from our percieved impossibilities and draw us into divine possibilities beyond our small hopes and imaginings.

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down... the prophets cry is answered in a still small voice that rings clear: "I am with you always, even until the end of the age" , a still small voice that calls you to look within and find the faith and hopes that lie within each one of us for we are created in the image of God. The still small voice who calls out to us beyond the manger and the cross, whose cry of "it is finished" has accomplished all already and calls us to join in with the task of recreation. 

Because he is with us we can lay aside our worries about what to eat and become perhaps more concerned with justice and the fact that others are not eating.

Because he is with us we can lay aside our sense of impotence and inadequacy and join our voices to the voices calling out for peace, and  an end to war we can cry out for mercy, and fight for love.

Yes we need to be ready, for Advent calls us beyond now to be heralds of a new future, and to live as those preparing and prepared for it. The wonder is that we don't have to accomplish it, we are simply called to join in with the work and move of God. So if the run up to Christmas leaves you feeling weary and disillusioned perhaps this is the time to seek the unforced rhythms of grace he calls us into, beyond ourselves into a future eternity that begins now in every human heart that turns to God.

Image; Break through mine

Follow me ( an advent meditation)

Oh that you would

tear open the heavens 

and come down.....

+

What use is infant flesh,

fragile vulnerable and mute

from all but mewling?

+

What answer is this

to a world in pain?

+

Why add to our confusion?

What good is this to peoples

destroying one another

and the earth?

+

What use to famine,

disease, dis-ease,

heart-break and war?

 

+

Shake the earth,

split the heavens

COME!

+

"Follow me"

I hear a still small voice;

"Follow me,

take the downward, inward

journey, the less

trodden path..."

+

TEAR OPEN THE HEAVENS

my heart is screaming....

+

"Open your heart"

the Spirit whispers now...

+

"Open your heart,

for I am here..."

+

"Follow me...."

Image mine

(Isaiah 64: 1)

space ( an advent longing)

I am not ready,

am unprepared...

+

I need a place,

a space, a time

to wait...

and wait,

+

I want to hold

silence

to ponder the

tension between 

 presence and absense,

the now and not quite yet

of God's new heaven

and earth...

bursting forth

among us,

yet still just

out of reach,

 out of sight.

 +

I need a place,

a space, a time

to wait...

and wait

 

+

I want this longing

to grow within me,

freeing me from dulled senses,

calling forth

a new possibility

that can only be found

by entering in

to the darkness

of advent waiting...

 waiting, and

waiting for the flame to be 

kindled once again.

+

I need a place,

a space, a time

to wait....

and wait

Celtic Advent- 40 days of preparation

It is that time of year our T.V. screens fill with Christmas adverts, as carols and tinsel and stacks of goodies fill shopping centres spilling out into the aisles trying to cajole us into an empty fullness, a surface celebration numbed by an apparent plenty. Bah humbug? Well yes probably, I am not in the mood for Christmas celebrations this year, I can't summon up the desire to even think about beginning to prepare when it comes to food and decorations and all that apparent necessary stuff that the season demands. 

I am tired of empty fullness, tired of the way that life seems to be overwhelmed with the trivial, tired of a life of reacting rather than responding because the treadmill we are all on to some extent just keeps turning beneath us. So I am going to stop, to step aside from the craziness for a while, take time to pause and observe a Celtic Advent. I am going to use the 40 days leading up to Christmas to have a spiritual clear out, to ask God to come into the dusty and dank recesses of my soul, the bits I hide even from myself, and clean me up.

I need to be refocused and recharged, I find myself at an unexpected crossroads and need to be reoriented, and I cannot do this for myself, I can only purposely give myself to the one who can, and that means letting go. Letting go of all that holds me back, of my own self protecting tendencies and the negative voices of my own making that surround me all too often. Of course this means repentance, turning again towards God and away from the things that are dragging me down.

Yes I am writing this while suffering from a bad bout of depression, but this time I want to find treasures in the darkness, I want to roll away the stone that is preventing the living waters from flowing freely within me. I want to kindle the flame, and fan it into life. I want to know love and joy and peace of Christ in a new deeper and fuller way...

So this weekend I will begin celebrating Advent, I could say observing but choose rather to celebrate, to look for those treasures that almost certainly lie within and will probably surprise me, I want to rediscover the gift of life that Jesus brings to us in all its fullness...

I will begin with a simple prayer:

Search me, O God, and know my heart;
    test me and know my anxious thoughts.
Point out anything in me that offends you,
    and lead me along the path of everlasting life.

Psalm 139 vs. 23-24 NLT