Advent Week One: Hope

 

I invite you to light one single candle, a candle of Hope, as you read this meditation.

O come, O Day-spring, come and cheer our spirits by your advent here;

Love stir within the womb of night, and death’s own shadows put to flight.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to you, O Israel!

We wait.  We watch.  We wonder and wander.  We prepare by honoring women in our lives who have shaped us with wisdom and love.  Just as God enters the world through Mary, the God-bearer, so God continues to enter the world through women in our lives.

In this third verse of the poem/prayer/Advent hymn, “O come, O come Emmanuel,” I love the line about “love stirring in the womb of night”.  Valarie Kaur talks about the darkness of life sometimes being a tomb and sometimes being a womb.  That in the struggles and stress of life somethings we find ourselves there because something is dying or ending.  Sometimes in the chapters of the narrative/story called, “Your life” there are endings.  It could be literal ones where a person you love dies.  It could also be that you have reached the end of a job or a volunteer opportunity.  Sometimes we stay far-too long at something that has ended because it is comfortable and our brain has a bias of complacency.  Our brain knows how hard it is to change, so it gives us all these amazing reasons why we should not bother.  Sometimes rather than a celebration of a graduation, we stay too long in a place or space that has taught us all that place or space can.  Like the man in Mark’s gospel who lives among the tombs, we know what it is like to have places and spaces in our life that we have outgrown, but we feel bound to nevertheless.

But the tomb, as Kaur tells us, can be a womb – a place of rebirth and new life.  The man in Mark’s gospel encounters Jesus and his life is forever changed.  But birth is painful and messy.  Birth will cause all sorts of disruptions to the narrative of life. 

While we wait, what tombs popped into your mind in the words above?  Are there places or spaces that you feel like you need to not carry into 2021?

While we wait, what wombs are gestating and growing within you?  Are there places and spaces that you feel like you want to give life too in 2021?

May God’s wisdom move in your heart this day with these questions.

Prayer: To us, O God, your path of wisdom show this day and every day this Advent season.  And cause us in her way to go.  Amen.