May it be done unto me
The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it! – from Psalm 24
As our pastor Jeff Augustine often says, “I looked up everything in the Greek, and it means everything!
So be it. In the joy of my salvation I do not claim for my own what belongs to God. Still, I forget what’s mine, who made what, and where I belong in the nature of things. Without reflection, I stop remembering where I came from. Then Advent’s quiet days and long nights remind me that all those gifts that surround us … do not belong to me.
When I was a little bitty baby my mama would rock me in the cradle … I could cry, but otherwise obedience and gratitude was primal, unconsidered, child-like. That changed quickly and stayed changed. Now that same obedience requires decision. I weigh my options and I usually choose, without quite admitting it, what will be best for me.
Ron Rolheiser writes books with titles like Holy Longing and Sacred Fire. Personally and philosophically he has discovered the passion within him and all of us – put there by God, often abused thereafter. That fire is there for us to recover, be warmed by, and pass on.
Rolheiser knows how difficult it is to return to what he calls the Bethlehem of the soul:
To be an adult is precisely to be experienced, complex, wounded. To be an adult is to have lost one’s innocence. None of us, unless we die very young, carries the dignity of our person and of our baptism unstained through life.
We fall, we compromise, we sin, we get hurt, we hurt others, and mostly we grow ever more pathologically complex, layer after layer separating us from the little child who once waited for Christmas in innocence and joyful anticipation.
It’s at this point that a good teacher says something like Allan Bloom told his University of Chicago freshmen: ““You come here with a lot of experience, already having tasted life, having been to a lot of places, and seen a lot of things, so I’m going to try to teach you how to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny again – then maybe you’ll have a chance to be happy!”
Rolheiser liked that. And I do too. Call it a second naivete. “I am waiting,” wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for a “rebirth of wonder.” Lose the sarcasm, lose the pretense, lose the anger, lose the fear. Let Santa come down your chimney. Open the gifts of God. They are there for you and for the taking.
If it’s too good to be true, it must be from you, Lord. And yes, it is too good to be true in any world except the one you made. Open my heart and turn my eyes to the east, where every day I can see the sun rise. You are here.
 http://www.davesandel.net/category/advent-and-christmas-devotions-2017/
http://www.christiancounselingservice.com/archived_devotions.php?article_id=1634
