Wednesday, December 11, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Advent lectio
Lift up your eyes on high and see who has created these things. Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is eternal, He is the creator of the ends of the earth.
As the sun runs higher in the sky the birds sing songs of spring, not because it’s March or May but because December temperatures rising outside also rise inside them. Not just the birds, but the dogs and cats we love, and the animals we never see but know are there waiting for dark – every created thing and us too, when we take a moment to stand or sit in the sun and feel the moment rather than thinking, worrying, regretting …
An instant of this warm communion runs my ears and eyes and hands along the top and sides and suddenly into the middle of one sweet creation after another. HEB brilliantly calls its buckets of ice cream “creamy creations.” In God’s soft sweet paradise I plunge my hand into one creamy creation after another, and it is good.
Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy-laden. I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart. You will find rest for your soul, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
My friend Anthony and his wife Tanya created a “digital Advent wreath.” They start with a psalm – on day 10 it’s a few verses of psalm 39. Accompanied by music he chose for the occasion, Anthony reads the passage four times in the style of lectio divina – between each reading he asks us to 1) consider a word or two from the verses, 2) think of why we choose those words, 3) pray about what we chose, and 4) finally listen, stand pat on the promises, and be still.
It’s a fine way to begin this most recent day that God has made. Balancing the joy of life in the kingdom with the reality of life on earth requires some juggling of what we ponder, and how we do it. Flannery O’Connor, great American writer who died of lupus as did her dad at far too early an age, calls her writing “Christ-haunted.” Joseph Pearce writes of what he calls her “suffering and sanity.”
“My subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil,” she tells us, echoing the words of Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov: “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.”
Do you not know? Have you not heard? They that wait upon the Lord will renew their strength, they will rise up on wings like eagles. They will run, and not grow weary. They will walk, and not faint.
Teach me, Lord, to wait.
(Isaiah 29, Psalm 27, Matthew 9)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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