Peering into Christmastide

A slightly bedraggled season's greetings

Dear friends, my warmest greetings from Colorado, where I’m visiting for several weeks for Christmas and New Years. It’s my first time back for Christmas in three years, and so I’m taking special delight in traditions and patterns so familiar and so missed.

Unfortunately, my arrival has also coincided with a rather nasty flu bug, which means my energy levels are rather depleted at present. I’ll return to a more robust posting regime next week for the next monthly installment of SOUND + SPIRIT, but I didn’t want to miss out sending along a short note to all of you prior to Christmas.

Before I was felled by my current malaise, I was able to fit in a lovely walk in the mountains near our family home. This little patch of Colorado is one of the few places in the world where I feel that, not is it imminently familiar to me, it also knows me in return, and welcomes me back into its rhythms in whatever season I find it. There is a strange comfort in its stark, stripped back grandeur. It is a place of rough edges, and chromatic colors, and wildness never fully tamed in spite of the constant stream of locals who cast themselves year after year into its beauty. It is not a landscape to be controlled or managed; many have tried and failed. It persists in its fierce resistance to that human tendency to make things into our own image. And yet, once one accepts that underlying fact about this landscape, it kindly opens up its warmth in ways not always seen from a distance. Whenever I return here, I feel that I am being told, welcome home.

This is, in a sense, the same way I feel about the final week of Advent. As we turn the bend toward the coming light, we have travelled through the long night, through the darkness, and have come to realise that there are no guarantees of what life might bring our way. There is a sense in which, trudging our way out of the darkened shadows, what we thought we knew to be reliable and settled and controllable in our lives is decidedly not so after all. Advent’s revelation of the coming light is made manifest precisely through this pilgrimage into and through the darkness.

And when we round the corner toward Christmas, we know, finally, that our destination is not one in which all the enigmatic edges of our lives are resolved with some sort of perfect Hollywood-style ending. When we encounter Christ, it is not because we have found our resolution or handled our difficulties, but because he meets us where we are. Advent gently encourages us to let go of our desire to control the narrative, to manage the landscape of our lives. Instead, it asks us to take up a spirit of humility and trust, walking straight into and through the wilderness; for it is there that we encounter the one whose coming appears in the midst of those vast wilds, who says to us, right in the tumble of our uprooted lives, welcome home.

Friends, may your final week of Advent carry you deeper into this mystery and give you grace to receive Christ in his coming this Christmastime.

Plough Article

Just one other quick thing to mention for your Advent journeys: I had such a delight reflecting on the Medieval chant ‘O Magnum Mysterium,’ a text celebrating the Incarnation of Christ, in an article with Plough Online. I hope you might give it a read and that it encourages you today!

Revelation and Mystery - Plough Online

Thanks friends and my warmest Christmas wishes to you all!