Destination Bethlehem. J. Barrie Shepherd
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comprehend.
Setting out for Bethlehem. Are we ready to set off? Are we ready to sit loose to those ties, those habits and attachments, all those belongings that would hold us back, weigh down our days of travel? Are we ready to launch out again on the journey to the stable, and to the child who awaits us there with laughter, song, and sounds of great rejoicing? Are we ready?
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Walk close beside us, Lord. Be our companion and support when the way seems long and weary. Then bring us, in your own good time, to the stable and the stall, to the still point of the turning world, to the gift of life revealed as we can kneel and offer up our souls, ourselves, then worship and adore. Amen.
Greeting
Sooner than ever—or so it seems—
that time of year is here again,
time when there is so little time to do the well-worn,
needful things, selecting trees and garlands,
not to mention gifts—just where is that old address list
left on the back of one of last year’s envelopes?—
a time when benedictions gather into heaps
with every morning’s mail,
as friendships are renewed on slips
of cheerful colored-paper.
Anyway, here’s wishing you some time,
time to kneel, at least,
within the cloistered chamber of the soul,
and say, or sing, or even weep, a word of peace
and promise, maybe praise. Whatever time we have,
that’s what it’s given for.
Advent Awakening
Just when you felt convinced
that the inevitable was already happening,
just when the utter daily-ness of every single thing
had finally persuaded you not to expect,
not even to look,
just when tomorrow
had completely forfeited its meaning
as distinct from everyday,
a melody of dancing was caught from far away,
one long sigh became transmuted in mid-air
into a gasp of sheer astonishment.
And now a word, He comes,
new whispered on December’s wind,
melts grim-set lips to simple speech,
and song, and framing age-old salutations.
Advent—Opening Bell
Stepping out
into a season overstuffed
with every kind of expectation,
except the kind we pray about in church,
four weeks—give or take—of sales charts,
balance sheets, consumer confidence reports,
and pay checks spent before they hit the bank,
I fear that any word of a messiah’s birth might bring
only a momentary dip in the Dow Jones,
the merest trace of jitters along Wall Street.
Re-petition
“Come again?” we ask,
meaning, “Please tell me one more time,
I didn’t quite catch your message.”
“Come again?”
Daily praying—without realizing it—
this earliest of all our invocations,
“Maranatha—Come Again!”
He does, of course, in daily bread
and Bibles, Sunday pulpits, tables too,
calls to love and duty, most especially
through this leaning forward season
when winter’s coat of white moves
greening toward Bethlehem.
The word is, “Come again!”
Looking for Christmas I
Looking for Something
Thou hast said, “Seek ye my face.”My heart says to Thee,“Thy face, Lord, do I seek.”Hide not Thy face from me.
—Psalm 27:8
Watch therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.
—Matthew 24:42
These Advent days are days in which everyone seems to be looking for something. Perhaps it is the perfect gift for someone who has everything already, or it may be the ideal shape tree for that difficult corner of your living room. Is it a card with a message that seems personally selected for each of your two hundred most intimate friends, yet is also both ecological and economical? Or might you be searching for a place at which, or a person or persons with whom, to spend the holiday season? Perhaps your hunt is for that fruitcake recipe, so successful last year, those delightful new decorations put away so carefully you forgot just where you did put them, that totally unique experience which will make this Christmas truly unforgettable.
Is your search, perhaps, a more desperate one: a quest for a blessed infusion of cold, hard cash to beat back those grim tidings of great bills in the Christmas mails, or for a few additional hours in which to get every last thing done, or even for a little peace and quiet in which to pause and recall what Christmas is truly all about? Whatever it may be, in these early Advent days everyone does seem to be looking for something.
But this is hardly just the case in Advent. Is there anyone nowadays who does not know the regular frustration of mislaying some object, and then wasting precious moments, even hours and days, “looking for something”? I hope it’s not the advancing years that bring it on, but somehow things, previously inanimate objects—keys, checkbooks, shopping lists, umbrellas—seem to be developing a habit of avoiding me of late, avoiding and/or evading me. Have you ever found yourself, for example, wondering what it was you forgot in the first place, trying to remember what it was you had been trying to remember? That’s when you know you have a problem.
Literature too—that rich treasury of story, saga, and fable—is filled with searches. From the ancient quest of Gilgamesh through the sagas of the Norsemen, King Arthur and the Grail, the rings of Tolkien, and of Wagner, all the way to the science-fiction fables of tomorrow—and all of them looking, looking for something.
The scientific community nowadays with its microscopes and telescopes, its atom smashers and colliders, shares this same understanding of itself as engaging in a continuing search, a search for something yet to be discovered—the secret of life, the cure for cancer, the source of unlimited energy, the outermost limits of the universe, the innermost, most elemental core from which all other building blocks of being are constructed. And all of them, all of us, are looking for something. In fact one might reasonably summarize the status, the basic condition of this entire human race, in just these three words. Whether it be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the fountain of youth, or that glorious city of God described in the Scriptures, to be human is to be looking for something.
What is it then that we are looking for, beneath all these secondary quests, these