Advent: Hope keeps me alive and creatively engaged with the world

Something has happened to me that I don’t like. I am now considered a senior minister. This is not something I warm too, which is pure vanity by the way. Senior sounds old and my ego wants to protest against this. The truth is though that I am. I have in the last year become more engaged in helping to develop our future ministers. I spent a few days away recently with the “Ministry in the Making” team. It was a very productive time as we began to shape next years program. There were many wonderful conversation including a rather beautiful one when the Helen Mason, the director of Unitarian College, shared something from a sermon of her paternal grandfather the great Rev Leonard Mason. I am told he once conducted one of the weddings of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Helen is from a long lineage of Unitarian luminaries including John Relly Beard one of the co-founders of Unitarian College Manchester and who is buried in Brooklands cemetery in Sale. Relly Beard is distant relative of her later mother Joy Winder who helped shape my own journey into ministry.

Sorry I digress. The sermon described God as being like a white tailed deer. Now I didn’t know this, but have since learnt that the white tailed deer raises its tail when it detects danger and it as it does the white underside of the tail becomes visible. It is this that is a metaphor for God and the suggestion being that you get a glimpse of this from time to time and it is this that draws us on. It spoke powerfully to me and my understanding of God, as not that which controls everything, but more that which is present, always luring me on, drawing me out of myself. The light of hope which at times may go quite dim and yet burns bright in the darkest of times the night. It reminded me of the humble words of the classic “Waterboys” song “The Whole of the Moon”. “I saw the crescent, you saw the whole of the moon”. I was thinking of this as I a friend discussed the beautiful crescent moon on cold and wet Tuesday morning. It is this sometimes dim light that brings me hope when hope is hard to find, my rose in the winter time. It also brought to mind the following “A Theology Adequate for the Night” by Nancy Shaffer

“A Theology Adequate for the Night” by Nancy Shaffer

Not God as unmoved mover:

One who set the earth in motion and withdrew. Not the One to thank when those cherished do not die – for providence includes equally power to harm. Not a God of exacting, as if love could be earned or subtracted.

But-this may work in the night:

Something that breathes with us, as others sleep; something that breathes also on those sleeping, so no one is alone. Something that is the beginning of love, and also each part of how love is completed. Something so large, wherever we are, we are not separate; which teaches again the way to start over.

Night is the test: when grief lies uncovered, and longing shows clear; when nothing we do can hasten earth’s turning or delay it.

This may be adequate for the night:

This holding: something that steadfastly breathes us, which we also learn to breathe.

God for me is always present, as close as my breath and yet this is not always clear. Yet is does seem to draw me, even though I only sometimes get a glimpse, see the crescent, whilst others see the whole of the moon.

At the end of sessions at “Ministry in the Making” we shared some devotional worship. Ant Howe played a wonderful version of the Hymn “Nearer Thy God to Me” by a Mormon male voice choir, it was incredibly powerful and moving. It is beautiful hymn, an absolute classic, written by the Unitarian writer Sarah Flower Adams in 1841. No doubt she will have known John Relly Beard. It depicts the story of Jacob’s dream, sometimes called Jacob’s ladder and was reputedly played by the band on the Titanic as it sank.

All this got my homiletic consciousness going and got me thinking of Advent and the light of hope that draws us as we head towards that moment of magic that is Christmas, when the light of hope is born once more. A light that always draws me on despite life’s very real struggles and the temptation of despair that comes in the night of life. I may only get a glimpse of the crescent, but it is enough. It seems I do not need to see the whole of the moon.

Today marks the beginning of Advent. A time for waiting, a time of preparation. A time set aside to wait for the “coming” of Love in human form symbolised in the birth of the Christ child. A promise of what love can become if we let it grow and nurture in our hearts and lives. For every new life is the gift of promise and possibility. A gift of possibility that can be reborn in each of our lives if we allow it to be.

The season of Advent invites us to embrace the spiritual discipline of waiting. We cannot rush through this season, we must experience it all, before the moment of magic. We must first sing the carols, light the candles and open the doors of the calendars. We must select our gifts for our loved ones and we must prepare ourselves for the year to come. We must experience the whole of this season if we are to give birth to the love that is at the core of it all; if we are to grow this love in the mangers of our own hearts and to give birth to and both experience and share it in our world. A world that needs love and hope as much as at any time in our history.

Advent is a season of preparation and it cannot be rushed. It requires patience. We cannot wish the days away, we cannot wish the winter away. We have to wait patiently, but not passively.

There are times when the light seems dim, like a white tailed deer, but it draws us on in hope and surely this the message of this season, the light of hope is always shinning drawing us on. We must though live in faith and hope, awaiting the birth of pure love, in the mangers of all our hearts.

It is hope that draws us on, it is hope that keeps us going especially in the cold and darkening days. As Seamus Heaney wrote:

“The days are getting shorter and colder, but I ask you to remember: even as the Winter comes in, there is Hope and there is Light." - Seamus Heaney

Advent is about believing in hope, in the possibility of hope, even of at times its light shines dim. Hope is an intimation of the heart to quote Vaclav Havel. If we choose hopelessness over hope it says more about the state of our own hearts and souls, than the state of the world in which we all live.

Advent is about being lured toward that light of hope, it is about turning toward love and life and not turning away. It is about not being seduced by lazy cynicism. This is put beautifully by the wonderful Victoria Safford in an interview with Krista Tippet for “On Being” I have one of her wonderful book of meditations “With or Without Candlelight”. Rev Victoria Safford serves the White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA. She said:

“Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of hope — not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of self-righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges; nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of “Everything is gonna be all right,” but a very different, sometimes very lonely place, the place of truth-telling, about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it might be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle — and we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking people what they see.

Of all the virtues, “hope” is one of the most-needed in our time. When people ask me how I stay hopeful in an era of widespread darkness, I answer simply: “Hope keeps me alive and creatively engaged with the world.”

It keeps me alive and fully engaged too. It draws me on and beyond myself to live alive in this world.

Hope is an orientation of the spirit, it is something that holds us and sustains us right here right now. It does more than that though, it draws us on, even if at times its light seems dim, a bit like those white tailed deer.

Advent is a time for waiting, for preparation, in the Christian tradition it is for the coming of the Christ child, the birth of hope. For me I see this in the birth of all life and by this I don’t just me physical life. Any hope that is born in manger of all our hearts. That love can incarnate in all our hearts, if we live in and by hope.

Advent invites us to cradle our hopes like a new born child, to truly wonder what love might look like if we were truly give birth to it and what it might truly mean to live life faithfully despite our very real troubles.

Advent is about waiting, but not doing so passively. The spiritual life is not a passive one, but it does require patience. It is about preparing for hope that may not yet be born, but it must be prepared for. Advent encourages us to be present and fully alive to this time of waiting. The time is now and the moment of magic is coming. So, we wait by being fully present to all that is alive around us, drawn on in and through hope, an orientation of the heart and the spirit.

For soon comes the moment of magic, the birth of hope, in the mangers of all our hearts.

Earlier I made reference to Vaclav Havel and his view that “Hope is an orientation of the spirit.” Havel was a writer and stateman and the first president of the Czech Republic following the end of Communism. He knew a lot about living by and through hope.

Here’s the wonderful poem of his on “Hope”. It seems appropriate to end with as we head toward that moment of magic, drawn on by hope.

“Hope” by Vaclav Havel

Hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world
Either we have hope within us or we don’t.
Hope is not a prognostication—it’s an orientation of the spirit.
You can’t delegate that to anyone else.

Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy
when things are going well,
or the willingness to invest in enterprises
that are obviously headed for early success,
but rather an ability to work for something to succeed.

Hope is definitely NOT the same as optimism.
It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well,
but the certainty that something makes sense,
regardless of how it turns out.

It is hope, above all, that gives us strength to live
and to continually try new things,
even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.
In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing
to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily,
without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.

Below is a video devotion based on the material in this "blogspot"