Meditations During Advent - Listening in the Stillness of Advent Season

I love this season. There is a centering, a settling about the way the light shines just so, where the earth’s tilt filters the brightness of the sun just a bit. The trees are bare and all that was hidden because of the green and growth we can now see, if we look about us. There is space open where there once was none.

 

Walks in the woods and hikes in the wintertime bring gifts of their own this time of year. There’s something about the clarity that comes when the cold fills my lungs; my mind feels clearer, my heart feels less weighted down. There are fewer people on the trails, the mountains feel more still and quiet.

 

Advent is a time when we are invited towards stillness, quiet, and the clarity that can come when we allow ourselves to make space for all that can come our way when we strip away some of the bright lights, the busy-ness that surrounds us--and make way for stillness, for quiet.

 

This clearing away is not always easy; the first cold mornings are a shock to the system and because of the lack of bright sunlight, and my body has a tendency to move a little slower. Maybe that’s the wisdom of the body. The gift of the cycle of God’s good creation of which we are surely not separate.

 

May in this Advent season, we listen to the rhythms of the creation all around us and within us. May we lean into the slowness, the stillness, the quiet. May we trust these rhythms even as they stand in direct contrast to what the culture offers to us in these days.

 

A prayer from John Philip Newell for this day:

 

 

 

Light within all light

Soul behind all souls

At the breaking of dawn

At the coming of day

We wait and watch.

Your Light within the morning light

Your Soul within the human soul

Your Presence beckoning to us from the heart of life.

In the dawning of this day

let us know fresh shinings in our soul.

In the growing colours of new beginning all around us

Let us know the first lights of our heart.

Great Star of the morning

Inner Flame of the universe

Let us be a colour in this new dawning.

Praying with the Earth: A Prayerbook for Peace

 

- The Rev. Mary Catherine Cole