December 7, 2021 - Advent Week 2

Psalm 36:5-9

Lord, your faithful love reaches to the heaven, your faithfulness to the clouds.  Your righteousness is like the highest mountains, your judgements like the deepest sea.  Lord, you preserve people and animals.  How priceless your faithful love is, God!  People take refuge in the shadow of your wings.  They are filled from the abundance of your house.  You let them drink from your refreshing stream.  For the wellspring of life is with you.  By means of your light we see light.    

 

It has been a weird, wordless season for me.  Perhaps due to the relentless Covid newsfeed; vaccine hesitancy and certainty stirring relational waters; change in employment status; unexpected challenge in the lives of loved ones... like leaves in Lethbridge wind, stress had blown away a certainty I once could easily articulate.  But, it seems that the circling of the calendar, the marking of Advent, remembering the Word who came to walk life among us, has helped me find some of my own words today.

 

A song from my daughter, meaningful to her and now to me, words penned by Rachel Held Evans and the hanging of a beloved print – all converged with Psalm 36. They were light I could see and call Kingdom because the faithful, loving Light of God’s presence reminded me He is still at work in this world. 

 

“It is nearly impossible to believe:  God shrinking down to the size of a zygote, implanted in the soft lining of a woman’s womb.  God growing fingers and toes.  God kicking and hiccupping in utero… God crying out in hunger.  God totally relaxed, eyes closed, his chubby little arms raised over his head in a posture of complete trust.  God resting in his mother’s lap.” (RHE) These words were a herald of understanding to me.  God knows.  These days, our days, have not slipped through His fingers.  God has an actual human hand that will someday hold mine.  

 

 

Mary and Eve – two women who frame my own shame and surrender.  Both waiting for release from a burden.  Release that would come through death and through birth.  How would they describe God’s faithfulness?  Their stories are truncated, subject to a limited, finite assessment of the work of God in their/our world, yet they bring me hope. The threads of their lives were not left hanging loose to be tangled by despair – God literally came and with Him a Kingdom that subverts the suffering and of this world.  I believe Jesus, help my unbelief.  

 

(Artist: Sr. Grace Remington, of the Cistercian Sisters of the Mississippi Abbey, 2004)

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, a benediction as we wait on God in this season.    

 

 
 

 

By His light, may we see light. 

Praying this prayer for all of us.

 

When it seems you're all but drowning

May the water quench your thirsting
When the sun is nearly blinding
May you, by it, see everything

 

When your worry leaves you weary
May your sleep be sound and healing
When the road is long and winding
And the wrong story is selling
May you find your own worth writing

 

When the fairies tell of weeping
May you show them all the glory
When there's too many to bury
May you know death lost already

 

When the burden's beyond bearing
May you know it's not yours only
When your body's worn and wasting
And time is only taking
May you find it all worth giving

 

In the silent war that's raging

Keep quietly rebelling

When there's always more to bury
May you know death lost already

 

In saecula saeculorum

 

When it seems you're all but drowning
May the water quench your thirsting
When the sun is nearly blinding
May you, by it, see everything

 

As it was meant to be
A wonder, extraordinary
Made to wander free and fearlessly
Unto all eternity

 

Because death has lost already

 

- Pam Ukrainetz




 

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