The most we can hope for is love

Reimagining Advent :: Week Four

This is the fourth and final part in a series of Advent Sunday night meditations for paid subscribers to Field Notes. It includes scripture selections or other readings, a brand new essay, opening and closing blessings as well as an audio reading.

Advent is the Church’s way of observing and remembering, of marking the truth we believe that God came to be with us once, and God is still with us, and God is coming again to set everything right. Tonight Christians all around the world light the fourth candle symbolizing Love and, in some places, a fifth candle, for Christmas Eve, too.

Secret Field Notes Podcast Alert

You can listen to me read this reflection for you as part of The Secret Field Notes Podcast, Episode 34. (This is a private podcast feed of occasional Field Notes essays for paid subscribers.) I try to stick to the written essay, but there are a few departures that always emerge so just a head’s up there.

Catching Up

• Advent Week 1: Let the Darkness Gather, We’ll Make a Home There

  • and/or the podcast version, if you prefer to listen

• Advent Week 2: Advent comes, not in spite of this moment in time but precisely because of it.

  • and/or the podcast version, if you prefer to listen

• Advent Week 3: Holding Scraps

  • and/or the podcast version

Take a moment to light the candles for Hope, Peace, Joy and then the candle for Love for this week. You should have all four candles burning for tonight. In our home, we often let them burn all the way down throughout the evening (under a watchful eye, of course).

Opening Prayer

Creator, Saviour, Spirit, tonight we light a candle for Love. We are yearning for Love tonight even though we’re not sure what that even means. So often we’ve been taught or given only half-love or conditional-love or performative love. We wonder if we can even recognize it when we see it or experience it. We believe, help our unbelief.

Tonight, please stretch us out towards love even if it leaves a mark. If we are unable to hold out hope for love, gather around us as a mother hen would shelter her chicks. Let us hide in the shelter of your faithful loving kindness, our true home. Give us the measure of faith for possibilities. Lift up our heads where we are downcast and surprise us with the starlight that remains to illuminate. This is the most we can hope for and so we’re swinging for the fences here.

Be taught now, among the trees and rocks,
how the discarded is woven into shelter, 
learn the way things hidden and unspoken
slowly proclaim their voice in the world.
Find that far inward symmetry
to all outward appearances, apprentice
yourself to yourself, begin to welcome back
all you sent away, be a new annunciation,
make yourself a door through which
to be hospitable, even to the stranger in you.
...
Live in this place
as you were meant to, and then,
surprised by your abilities,
become the ancestor of it all,
the quiet, robust, and blessed Saint
that your future happiness 
will always remember.

- David Whyte, "Coleman's Bed"

“I’ve loved you the way my Father has loved me. Make yourselves at home in my love.” - Jesus (John 15:9, The Message)

Meditation

As our Advent draws to a close and Christmas begins, I’m grateful for this opportunity to simply pause together. To remember our waiting then and our waiting now. To hold both the fourth Sunday of Advent and the eve before Christmas together. To exhale, light a candle, and remember where we belong even in the midst of crumbling and crashing. We don’t get to set love aside as a luxury for the good times. It is in moments like this, moments of chaos and conspiracy, that love matters even more.