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Overview
What does it mean to be human in this season of waiting? And what does it mean to believe that God became human? In language drenched in poetry, this collection of meditations for Advent and Christmas explores what it means to gaze into the mystery that is Incarnation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819225115 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morehouse Publishing |
| Publication date: | 09/01/1999 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 112 |
| File size: | 392 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Our December Hearts
Meditations for Advent and Christmas
By Anne McConney
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 1999Anne McConneyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2511-5
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1NOVEMBER 27
WALKABOUT
The time of Advent is a strange time, a season of dark, a season of waiting. It is also, perhaps oddly, a season of movement and journeying, a season of discovery. It carries within it a powerful sense of a place left behind and a place not yet reached. Advent is filled with loss and regret and unshaped possibilities. Advent sings to us of death and birth and rebirth.
Among the native Australians there is a custom called walkabout. When a man or woman feels the need for spiritual renewal, he or she sets out, usually on foot, to go where chance or fate or impulse may lead, to see the world as it is in this particular place on this particular year or month or week or day, to drink the present moment in all its fullness and thus quench the thirst of the spirit. It is an ancient and wise custom.
In the Christian year, Advent is the season of walkabout.
It is a paradox that this should be so, that this season in which we huddle near warmth and light should also be the season when we open our minds to all the potentialities of God's creation. Deep in November the sun wanes quickly and the nights are heavy with a frost as cold as ancient bones. This is a time that chilled our primitive ancestors with dread, a time when the sun began to sink and fail, and who knew if it would ever come again? These antique memories, foolish as we know them to be, still ride in our genes, still shape our human legacy. Somewhere in the core of our being we know that we were born for the light, and the loss of it fills us with anguish.
If ever there was a time for walkabout, these dim and waning days of early winter are when we need it most. Let the body crouch by its fireside if it must; let it light its lamps against the dark that comes too swiftly and too soon. The walkabout that we call Advent is a thing of the spirit that wanders where it will, a letting in of possibility, an exploration into hidden places, and finally a song whispering in leafless trees and carried on the hard, pure air. "Come," it sings. "Here the journey begins, and it is long and not for the faint of heart. Here there be dragons."
Advent is the time when we prepare for the coming of the Christ child, the time when we stand mute and awestruck, as blinded by wonder as any shepherd on a Middle Eastern hill, the time when—in the words of poet Loren Wilkinson—"God let go of Godhead in a child."
This is the central statement of Christianity, the solid baseline of our theology from which all else follows: God let go of Godhead and lived as a human being. The God who created a cosmos larger than we can imagine and more beautiful than we can bear was born as a small, squalling infant. The God who made an eternity without beginning or end, who made time and the passage of time with all its ruthless necessities of birth, growth, aging and death, also came to live in time. God came to walk amid friends, companions and enemies, to watch the seasons come and go over a parched and dusty land, to know the past only as a memory and the future only as hope and fear. God came to live through—even as we do—the ills and joys, the pleasures and confusions that are the inevitable heritage of flesh and bone and blood.
This is the terror that strikes us to the root of our souls and the glory that burns in our blood. This is the question we fear and yet must ask: what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to believe that God was human too? What think ye of Christ?
So the Advent walkabout is not an easy journey, nor was meant to be. This journey leads into the deeps of our own being. It is an opening of portals we have taken care to keep closed, a letting in of the knowledge and doubt and pain without which there can be no letting in of the Christ, the child whose touch blesses, burns, heals and transfigures.
The Advent walkabout cannot be for the fainthearted for it demands extravagant courage and uncompromising honesty. It begins today. It ends at the manger that is not merely a pretty story but the transforming reality of God.
CHAPTER 2NOVEMBER 28
... TO THEE, A WAYFARER
The time is uncertain but it is the dead of night. I am alone, surrounded by a labyrinth of dirty brick walls lit by dim bulbs with wire-mesh covers. Graffiti and a few makeshift signs cover the walls, for this is the warehouse district of a large city, a deserted warren of aging buildings tied together by an unruly knot of cobble and asphalt and cracked cement streets.
I prowl through this empty urban night searching for a way out, for there is somewhere I need to reach, some far, bright place that I must find....
I dreamed this dream at intervals over many years. It was never a nightmare; I felt only frustration at a situation that, in real life, probably would have filled me with terror. In my dreams I never reached the shining place, but I rather imagine it may have represented ordination, for after I became a priest the dream stopped and I have never had it since.
The memory of the dream serves to remind me, however, that the mind is a wondrous thing and that we have only begun to scout its mysteries. The mind can take the images of every day and by the alchemy of dreams turn them into symbols of a deeper truth. And one of the most universal of these symbols is that life is a journey. We are all, somewhere deep in our psyches, poor wayfaring strangers. We are pilgrims searching for the way to God, often unaware that we have already found it.
Jesus said, "I am the way," and added, "No one comes to the Father but by me" (John 14:6)—a statement that has all too often been interpreted to mean that unless one holds the proper opinions about Jesus, one cannot get to heaven.
We need, I think, to move beyond such concepts. Christianity is a complex religion. The "simple gospel" is not simple at all, nor was it understood so in the early church. During those first centuries, the church demanded some three years of intensive study before administering baptism. The theological thought of Paul still engrosses scholars with its intricacy and boldness. In every era across our span of two thousand years, saints, thinkers, and poets have added new insights and understandings to the once-and-forever Good News.
When we speak of Christ, then, as "the way," I think we need to pause and ask what we mean by that phrase. Way is, after all, one of those slippery little words with several meanings, each of them slightly different. We ask "the way" to our destination; we show a child "the way" to tie his shoes; sometimes we say with pride, "I did it my way," or speak of "the American way." Which of these ways do we mean when we talk of Christ?
The answer, of course, is all of them. Christ is the path that leads into the creating mind that made the universe; he is the gateway into love and the bridge that lies across the chasm between human and divine. He is our camino real into the heart of God.
But Christ is more than that; he is also our model and our mentor. Just as we show a child how to perform simple life skills, Christ instructs us and demonstrates for us the far more complicated skills of spiritual living. And, last of all, Christ is the sanctified life within every one of us. Somewhere in the reaches beyond this world, we have agreed to accept the inner fire kindled in us, to take on the daunting and humbling task of continuing Christ's healing and redemptive work, to say with Paul, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20).
So I suggest that the Christ life is the human life and the way it represents is the human way. How cou
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Our December Hearts by Anne McConney. Copyright © 1999 by Anne McConney. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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