the Octave of Christmas 2015 December 19: O Radix Jesse: Root of Jesse

textile artist Linda Witte Henke http://bit.ly/1kbhzLp

O Radix Jesse: "O Root of Jesse, O Flower of Jesse's stem, you have been raised up as a sign for all peoples; kings stand silent in your presence; the nations bow down in worship before you. Come, let nothing keep you from coming to our aid."

Isaiah: “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots: and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him: the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and fortitude, the spirit of knowledge, and of the fear of God.”

We spend a good deal of our lives waiting – in line, for family members to get ready for a trip, the bus, on line at the grocery store … waiting for the weekend to come … waiting for someone to come through a cold or an operation … waiting on a vacation … sometimes the waiting is filled with dread and sometimes we joyfully anticipate the happy conclusion of our waiting. The celebration of waiting is what Advent is about. Whether we are conscious of it or not, each of us, at some level, is waiting for God, even while we celebrate the coming of Messiah, especially as we spend time with God during God's daily visitations into our lives.

During this season we are drawn into this spiritual dimension of that continual human cycle of waiting: recognition of want, longing, fulfillment, and the return and deepening of our waiting and desire. This is not a matter of going around in circles, but of moving in a kind of spiral, always more deeply integrated into God's life. God's Spirit fills us with the longing that makes it possible for us to wait more steadily and with more hope for new manifestations of God's presence in our lives. And our Spirit-filled longing helps us live JOYfull-ly trusting that in Christ, God will fulfill the desires of our hearts.

Advent 1 2015 03 Wednesday

<One of the essential paradoxes of Advent: that while we wait for God, we are with God all along, that while we need to be reassured of God’s arrival, or the arrival of our homecoming, we are already at home. While we wait, we have to trust, to have faith, but it is God’s grace that gives us that faith. As with all spiritual knowledge, two things are true, and equally true, at once. The mind can’t grasp paradox; it is the secret knowledge of the soul. - Michelle Blake, The Tentmaker>

Advent 1 2015 02 Tuesday

<The season of Advent means there is something on the horizon the likes of which we have never seen before… .What is possible is to walk past it, to miss it, to turn just as it brushes past you. And you begin to grasp what it was you missed, like Moses in the cleft of the rock, watching God’s back fade in the distance. So sit. Breathe. Linger. Tarry. Ponder. Behold. Ruminate. Meditate. Wonder. There will be time enough for running. For rushing. For worrying. For pushing. So for now, stay. Wait. Something is on the horizon, the likes of which we have never seen before. - Jan L. Richardson, Night Visions: Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas, sort of>

ADVENT 4: Monday: God Replies, Thank you for bearing the light

We may say, <Thank you for this Advent journey. The anticipation has filled my life and made me long for a closer relationship with you.> and God replies, <Blessed are you who bear the light through unbearable times, who testify to its endurance amid the unendurable, who bear witness to its persistence when everything seems in shadow and grief. Blessed are you in whom the light lives, in whom the brightness blazes—your heart a chapel, an altar where in the deepest night can be seen, the fire that shines forth in you in unaccountable faith, in stubborn hope, in love that illumines every broken thing it finds. – Jan Richardson>

ADVENT 1: Friday: We Are Pregnant, the Place of Waiting

<When asked about a life lived in Christian authenticity, a Master of Novices once said that to be a Christian was not to know the answers, but to begin to live in the part of the self where the questions are born.…She was speaking of an attitude of listening, of awareness of presence, of an openness to mystery...Pregnancy is at the core of the Christian message. We are pregnant. We are the place of waiting, the place of the question, of the advent. We are the womb through whose pulsing life God is born.">

- Wendy M. Wright, "Wreathed in Flesh and Warm"

ADVENT 1: Tuesday: We Are Pregnant Together With Mary

Statue of the Visitation at Church of the Visitation in Ein Karem, Israel, source: Deror avi

<We have waited in silence on your loving-kindness, O God.—Psalms 48:8>

<Most of the time, we hurry and we push. We split time into tenths of seconds. We fret when a traffic light turns red or we miss a train. The press of hurrying creates harried and hassled souls, disconnected from Spirit and from the gift of kindness itself. "Waiting in hope" is an attitude of faith, of trust, of joyful expectation. Waiting with a quiet spirit, creating space for absolute trust that we are exactly where we are supposed to be, may be the most essential practice for followers of the Christ. It is in many ways the spirit of Advent, that time of year when we practice the waiting of gestation, hoping, of trusting in new life not yet fully known. Thomas Merton remarked that life is a perpetual Advent, a continuous contemplation: <Let us become more humble than the rocks, More wakeful than the patient hills.> He sensed that in that waiting, trust begins to grow. Trust in God who is beyond all that is created and is the source of all things, seen and unseen. Trust that God is now among us and will come again among us in a rich and meaningful way at the end of our waiting. Trusting and waiting allows the loving-kindness that is the essence of God’s own Life to grow in us, and to bear fruit that we never expected.>

<Grant me O God the capacity to wait in hope,
to allow your own loving-kindness to grow in me,
for the life of your world. > 

- Mary C. Earle, sort of