Advent Reflections

DSCF8721, a photo by rajmarshall on Flickr.

For the second year, our church has produced a book of relections for Advent. Church members were given a Bible passage and asked to reflect and write their thoughts on it. You can read the complete booklet here.
I had the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24:43) and mine took the form of a meditation:

Weeds cover the churchyard
Moss and lichen blur the tidy sharp lines of old gravestones
Untidiness, a Hindrance? Protection? Comfort?
Green softening the old outlines.

Guy ropes snaking across the paving stones - a barrier or a support?
Bright tension and opportunity, challenging our moral tidiness
The tents of the ungodly are where? freedom? church? money?
Those with little, seeing riches on every side.

First the blade and then the ear,
Then the full corn shall appear;
And the fruitful ears to store -
But in the fire the tares to cast;

Thank God we are not the final judges
help us to live with untidyness,
but always growing into that fruitfulness.

Letting down holy socks

Here's an unseasonal thought:

..you have to accept the uncomfortable gifts that Advent offers: not gold, frankincense and myrrh, but waiting, despair, judgement. The saintly road is not so much about striving to pull up holy socks as letting them slide down. Not that you sag in holiness, be we are asked to adopt a discipline of surrender. ... The Church is for the most part in the fast lane, being driven harder than it can faithfully go. It is hyperactive with false hope.

from David Wood's 'Dark Prayer', letters written to the Community of the Three Hours

Maria durch ein Dornwald ging

via faraway67 (on twitter)

Advent

St Paul's Macclesfield
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

I took this photo when walking across Macclesfield this morning, in very cold weather, to a morning service. And for this day a few verses from Anne Ridler's Nothing is Lost

Nothing is lost, for all in love survive.
I lay my cheek against his sleeping limbs
To feel if he is warm, and touch in him
Those children whom no shawl could warm,
no arms, no grief, no longing could revive.

Thus what we see, or know,
Is only a tiny portion, at the best,
Of the life in which we share; an iceberg's crest
Our sunlit present, our partial sense,
With deep supporting multitudes below.

Christmas Eve - clouded and dingy

"Yet it would make those carolling angels weep
To think how Incarnate Love
Means such trivial joys to us children of unbelief?"
No. It's a miracle great enough
If through centuries, clouded and dingy, this Day can keep
Expectation alive.

from Cecil Day-Lewis Christmas Eve

White Pine

Trees have been witness
to my life, have been emblem.
I've wept my griefs
into the high darkness
of their arms, cheek against
a cone's rough open scales.
The seeds that took
in my year, 1950,
have grown a foot a year.
My eye walks out
along a branch shining
in rain, and looks back
from a long way away.
In the twilight,
night's shadow means sleep,
and no one wants to.
We all want to stay out
playing kick-the-can,
wild for another half hour
with some new kids.

Again from Chase Twichell's The Snow Watcher as we wait for this evening's snow - which has just arrived. Not quite mine - I was born in 1951.

Church St

Church St
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

Sparked by this item on James Rosenthal and Nick Sagovsky being denied admittance to Yarl's Wood:
Without Right of Abode
Her Majesty's Prison, Haslar, Gosport, UK

Refugees from tyranny
plead for asylum.
Prison closes around them
while they wait.
Language is a useless tool:
no one understands.

Outside the wire
encircling winds worsen.
Gales rock the hillside,
seas advance. Around the world
top statemen double-talk,
confuse and threaten.

Christmas gains admission
without visa and tinsel.
The dispossessed share common ground.
Ancient chants and modern prayers
harmonise in a Babel-mix of tongues.

Hope lights the chapel for an hour,
passed hand-to-hand.

Edna Eglinton (from Doing December Differently)

Looking towards the cold season

.. and Advent

Advent is lack. Emptiness. The time before. It is a compound of dark and cold, mourning and desire. It is bereavement, yearning, bafflement. It is interrogation, silence; it is a hand pressed to the chest.

from Paula's House of Toast but go and look at the link for the stunning pictures and then stop.

getting a bit late now...

..but here is the wonderful Trinity Wall St Advent calendar.

for Christmas Eve

Poulenc's wonderful Christmas Motet O Magnum Mysterium

Snow

(bit late now..) here's one of the sets of words I was trying to find from earlier in the month

Everyday it snows an inch or two,
Muting the music in the pines.
Old music.

Snow holds back the dawn-
an extra minute of lying here
while the self sleeps on.

again from Twichell's Snow Watcher.
And for a slightly different comment, here's Ivor Gurney's Sleep:

And more conventionally

St Michael's choir
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

..here's the choir in front of the tree

.. and behind the tree

.. and behind the tree
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

After this evenings carol service spotted the reflection of the tree in the bank's windows announcing sales and insecurity.

Apologies

I seem to have fallen further behind with advent postings. I went into the garden yesterday but all the pictures had terrible camera shake (or something), I thought I was doing ok. So while you wait for me to get myself together, here are a couple of Adventish resources:

• Diana Butler-Bass's Advent calendar from Sojourners
• Thinking Anglicans also has an interesting sequence

directions

early morning
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

Approaching Oxford Road Station (well it would be if there were a train there)

And this poem from a gravestone in Ely Cathedral in memory of 2 deaths on a railway in 1845. I don't think I've seen the actual stone but I was certainly given the postcard with a certain twinkle in David Isitt's eye.

The line to Heaven by Christ was made,
With heavenly truth the Rails are laid,
From Earth to Heaven the Line extends,
To Life Eternal where it ends.
Repentance is the Station then,
Where Passengers are taken in ;
No Fee for them is there to pay,
For Jesus is himself the way.
God's Word is the first Engineer,
It points the way to Heaven so clear,
Through tunnels dark and dreary here.
It does the way to Glory steer.
God's Love the fire, his Truth the Steam,
Which drives the Engine and the Train;
All you who would to Glory ride,
Must come to Christ, in him abide.
In First, and Second, and Third Class,
Repentance, Faith, and Holiness,
You must the way to Glory gain,
Or you with Christ will not remain.
Come then poor Sinners, now's the time,
At any Station on the Line,
If you'll repent, and turn from sin,
The Train will stop and take you in.

And as a result of searching for that poem, I found this page of railway related music.
(Yes I know I've lost a day, I do hope to catch up!)

berries

berries
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

Berries peeping over the wall of a block which has been abandoned and is up for development.

and testifies
how best beauty's born of hardihood

(Sylvia Plath Mayflower)
..probably the wrong colour!

Out in the yard

Garden pot
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

..this morning
I'm preaching tomorrow and I said these words 3 years ago when speaking about the same set of passages (Mark 1, 2 Peter 3 and Isaiah 40)

Advent - coming - that means change, adventure.
When thinking of the origin of the word 'Advent, comes from advenire (Italian) to happen, happening - a very 60'sterm how do we deal with change/happenstance? We want to change others
but do we want to change? What has brought me to where I am today, maybe God, maybe what has been done to me, what am I going to make of it, what is God going to make of me?

I wouldn't be surprised if some of those words appeared again tomorrow.

Winter morning

Winter morning
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

Weather wasn't good yesterday, so two for the price of one today!
The dark future in the winter morning, with Astra Zeneca dominating the town.

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

(Wordsworth)
But where does the town go now?

The market place

In the market place this evening, all the snow gone

I raised the mountains for you, and set the streams
Running down the hills for love. I saw the moss grow

Kathleen Raine Parting

Red and White

.. not my photo but taken, this week in our garden:
and from Mark Doty's wonderful 'My Alexandria collection:

..suspended white cargo sifted
equally all night onto roofs
and lilacs, fenceposts and streets.
We're the shook heart of the paperweight

the glass village falling forever
through the steady arms
of the snow, which touch us,
each pair, just once.
...

(Advent Calendars)