Meditations During Advent: Always Becoming

This week we are in the home stretch of our Advent journey and Christmas is nigh. We have been invited into the stories of our faith as we have traveled through the pages of Scripture, we have been invited into the depths of our own stories as we have reflected on the season and what it stirs for us within.
 
While we have been invited on the journey—and we may feel ready to “get there”—because, who doesn’t love singing Christmas carols, gathering with loved ones, opening and giving gifts!?, I would like to offer that while Advent ends, the path on which we have been traveling does not.
 
One of the definitions for Advent is “a coming into being” … and I love the notion that at this beginning of our Christian calendar for the year, every year, we are reminded that we are always being invited into a coming into being as the Christ is born into the world. In Jesus’ coming, so we are invited to our birth and rebirth, our very becoming.
 
Feminist process theologians offer us the frame of understanding God as the One who invites us always toward wholeness and goodness. This is one way we can experience God as manifested through us and in our world. The invitation toward becoming is an active process of exploration and seeking, not an arrival at a stopping point in our spiritual journey.
 
As we continue to walk into this holiday season and into the new year, I offer this poem from Jan Richardson:
 
How the Light Comes
 
I cannot tell you
how the light comes.
What I know
is that it is more ancient
than imagining.
That it travels
across an astounding expanse
to reach us.
That it loves
searching out
what is hidden
what is lost
what is forgotten
or in peril
or in pain.
That it has a fondness
for the body
for finding its way
toward flesh
for tracing the edges
of form
for shining forth
through the eye,
the hand,
the heart.
I cannot tell you
how the light comes,
but that it does.
That it will.
That it works its way
into the deepest dark
that enfolds you,
though it may seem
long ages in coming
or arrive in a shape
you did not foresee.
And so
may we this day
turn ourselves toward it.
May we lift our faces
to let it find us.
May we bend our bodies
to follow the arc it makes.
May we open
and open more
and open still
to the blessed light
that comes.

 

- The Rev. Mary Catherine Cole