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Our December Hearts
Meditations for Advent and Christmas
Anne McConney
Copyright © 1999 by Anne McConney
Morehouse Publishing P.O. Box 1321 Harrisburg, PA 17105
Morehouse Publishing is a division of The Morehouse Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
The Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyrighted 1946, 1952, 1971, and 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, and are used by permission.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design by Corey Kent
Cover image: Icicles hanging over cave mouth/Corbis
McConney, Anne.
Our December hearts: meditations for Advent and Christmas / Anne McConney.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8192-1786-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Advent Meditations. 2. Christmas Meditations.
3. Episcopal Church Prayer-books and devotions—English. I. Title.
BV40.M28 1999 99-31259
242’.33—dc21 CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
FOREWORD
Any Advent book that attempts to provide a meditation for each and every day is in trouble before it starts, for Advent is a tricky little season that sometimes begins as early as November 27 or as late as December 3.
For those careful souls who want to read one meditation per day and no more, we therefore suggest that you begin with “Walkabout” on November 27. If Advent hasn't officially begun yet, don't worry—it soon will and you will arrive at Christmas, New Year's Day, and Epiphany right on schedule, with a glance at the feasts of Saint Lucia and the Holy Innocents along the way.
If on the other hand you are a reader given to indiscriminate grazing, may you—like the deer in the forest—find forage here for the dark time, perhaps a few rich and tasty acorns to munch, and no doubt a number of thistles to nudge aside. Graze in peace. There is no right or wrong way to read a book, for any book, even the worst, is a message in a bottle, set adrift by another human soul, and should be received in whatever way suits best.
May we know the love of God through Advent and in all the seasons of our lives.
for Janet
NOVEMBER 27
WALKABOUT
The time of Advent is a strange time, a season of dark, a season of waiting. It is also, perhaps oddly, a season of movement and journeying, a season of discovery. It carries within it a powerful sense of a place left behind and a place not yet reached. Advent is filled with loss and regret and unshaped possibilities. Advent sings to us of death and birth and rebirth.
Among the native Australians there is a custom called walkabout. When a man or woman feels the need for spiritual renewal, he or she sets out, usually on foot, to go where chance or fate or impulse may lead, to see the world as it is in this particular place on this particular year or month or week or day, to drink the present moment in all its fullness and thus quench the thirst of the spirit. It is an ancient and wise custom.
In the Christian year, Advent is the season of walkabout.
It is a paradox that this should be so, that this season in which we huddle near warmth and light should also be the season when we open our minds to all the potentialities of God's creation. Deep in November the sun wanes quickly and the nights are heavy with a frost as cold as ancient bones. This is a time that chilled our primitive ancestors with dread, a time when the sun began to sink and fail, and who knew if it would ever come again? These antique memories, foolish as we know them to be, still ride in our genes, still shape our human legacy. Somewhere in the core of our being we know that we were born for the light, and the loss of it fills us with anguish.
If ever there was a time for walkabout, these dim and waning days of early winter are when we need it most. Let the body crouch by its fireside if it must; let it light its lamps against the dark that comes too swiftly and too soon. The walkabout that we call Advent is a thing of the spirit that wanders where it will, a letting in of possibility, an exploration into hidden places, and finally a song whispering in leafless trees and carried on the hard, pure air. “Come,” it sings. “Here the journey begins, and it is long and not for the faint of heart. Here there be dragons.”
Advent is the time when we prepare for the coming of the Christ child, the time when we stand mute and awestruck, as blinded by wonder as any shepherd on a Middle Eastern hill, the time when—in the words of poet Loren Wilkinson—“God let go of Godhead in a child.”
This is the central statement of Christianity, the solid baseline of our theology from which all else follows: God let go of Godhead and lived as a human being. The God who created a cosmos larger than we can imagine and more beautiful than we can bear was born as a small, squalling infant. The God who made an eternity without beginning or end, who made time and the passage of time with all its ruthless necessities of birth, growth, aging and death, also came to live in time. God came to walk amid friends, companions and enemies, to watch the seasons come and go over a parched and dusty land, to know the past only as a memory and the future only as hope and fear. God came to live through—even as we do—the ills and joys, the pleasures and confusions that are the inevitable heritage of flesh and bone and blood.
This is the terror that strikes us to the root of our souls and the glory that burns in our blood. This is the question we fear and yet must ask: what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to believe that God was human too? What think ye of Christ?
So the Advent walkabout is not an easy journey, nor was meant to be. This journey leads into the deeps of our own being. It is an opening of portals we have taken care to keep closed, a letting in of the knowledge and doubt and pain without which there can be no letting in of the Christ, the child whose touch blesses, burns, heals and transfigures.
The Advent walkabout cannot be for the fainthearted for it demands extravagant courage and uncompromising honesty. It begins today. It ends at the manger that is not merely a pretty story but the transforming reality of God.
NOVEMBER 28
…TO THEE, A WAYFARER
The time is uncertain but it is the dead of night. I am alone, surrounded by a labyrinth of dirty brick walls lit by dim bulbs with wire-mesh covers. Graffiti and a few makeshift signs cover the walls, for this is the warehouse district of a large city, a deserted warren of aging buildings tied together by an unruly knot of cobble and asphalt and cracked cement streets.
I prowl through this empty urban night searching for a way out, for there is somewhere I need to reach, some far, bright place that I must find….
I dreamed this dream at intervals over many years. It was never a nightmare; I felt only frustration at a situation that, in real life, probably would have filled me with terror. In my dreams I never reached the shining place, but I rather imagine it may have represented ordination, for after I became a priest the dream stopped and I have never had it since.
The memory of the dream serves to remind me, however, that the mind is a wondrous thing and that we have only begun