Dear Friends,
The beginning of Advent and this growing time of darkness is always a rich time for me. When there is not so much light around me all the time, my eyes begin to see in different ways. I learn to appreciate shadows and perceive the surprising levels of light in darkness. I trust my other senses to guide me and rely on other ways of knowing than those I practice in the bright light of summer days. Poetry and metaphor and song and symbol speak louder than words and truth seems to take on new shapes.
If not Advent, certainly at Christmas, we think we should be happy and feel good and count our blessings. But the truth is not so simple. For everything that brings us joy in this season, a sorrow lurks nearby. For all that we receive, there is also that which we lose. Life still has its ordinary demands, even amidst our Advent observance and the celebration of Christmas. Perhaps Advent and Christmas add a level of profundity to life that we miss in the brighter days? It isn’t that all things are better or all things are worse this time of year. It’s just that they take on more meaning. We think more. We perceive more. We reflect more. And truth, the good and the bad of it, becomes all more apparent to us.
There is room for such thinking, perceiving and reflecting on the season at Montview. We invite you into the deep of Advent and the joy of Christmas. Journey with us through our Christmas music, advent sermons, lighted candles and giving beyond ourselves. Bring your children to learn and experience the season. Join us in the hard work of waiting to receive God into our very human world. Gather with us to pray, to listen, to celebrate and to share this holy season, where darkness becomes as light and ordinary gives way to extraordinary.
This beautiful “Letter to Lewis Smedes about God’s Presence” propels me into the sacred Advent space. Join me, as we journey together.
Cindy
I have to look in cracks and crevices.
Don’t tell me how God’s mercy
is as wide as the ocean, as deep as the sea.
I already believe it, but the infinite prospect
gets father away the more we mouth it.
I thank you for lamenting God’s absences -
from marriages going mad, from the deaths
of your son and mine, from the inescapable
terrors of history: Treblinka, Viet Nam.
September Eleven. It’s hard to celebrate
God’s invisible Presence in the sacrament
while seeing his visible absence from the world.
This must be why mystics and poets record
the slender incursions of splintered light,
echoes, fragments, odd words and phrases
like flashes through darkened hallways.
These stabs remind me that the proud
and portly old church is really only
that cut green slip grated into a tiny nick
that merciful God himself slit into the the stem
of his chosen Judah. The thin and tenuous
thread we hang by, so astonishing,
is the metaphor I need at the shoreline
of all those immeasurable oceans of love.
Rod Jellema
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