May we become the light we have all been waiting for

I was walking through Altrincham the other morning. I was feeling good; feeling more settled as I feeling more at home, back in the chapel house. It has been a difficult few months; it has been a difficult couple of years for all of us.

Altrincham was busy that Saturday morning, the town was bursting with life. It was a challenge to weave my way through the burgeoning crowd. I found myself caught up in what appeared to be a bit of bottle neck and I soon understood why. There in front of me was a very old man, looking like he was being held up and walked down the street by what was obviously two young adult granddaughters. They were carefully and lovingly guiding his every step. His face was an absolute picture, I do not believe I have ever seen a happier one. The whole image light up my heart and soul. A light shining bright in this time of darkness. Don’t we all need our hearts and souls lighting at this time; don’t we all need to bear witness to hope coming to life in human form. Well, there it was, a little light shining bright, in a time of darkness.

We all need to see our Immanuel’s, the promise made to humanity of the coming of love, in human form, in a time of darkness. Immanuel means that God is still with us. Well, there it was shining bright on the streets of Altrincham, love come alive in human form. If we look for it, we will find it; if we live from it, it will come alive in our lives for others to see.

Advent is the time of waiting, of preparation for the light to come alive, to be born again. Well, it can do so in the manger of our hearts, in our frail human lives. We don’t need to wait for something to come at some time in the future. Instead, we need to prepare for it in our lives and give birth to it for all to see. Not just in the manger in an ordinary stable, but in our homes, in our families, on our streets, in our communities. Let us become the gifts we have all been waiting for. Our world needs it right now. Don’t we all need to see a little Hope. Let us become that Hope, the Immanuels we have all been waiting for. May we see in one another’s lives that God is still with us.

So let us become the light, but at the same time we do not need to either fear or decry the darkness. In this time of darkness, it is important to not only look for light, but we must also learn to love the dark. The Divine is there present in the dark, just as much as the light. If it were not, then the dark winters would be even harder than they are.

Christmas and Advent is a season of Joy, but what if we do not feel so joyful, does this mean we are not welcome, of course not. When we say come as you are, exactly, as you are, we mean that. We say bring your whole selves and we mean that. If God is still with us, then the Divine is present in the darkness too. Please do not hide any aspect of yourself, for it is welcome here.

Sometimes we are too quick to turn on the lights and not acknowledge the dark. This can be shocking and overwhelming. There are times we must let our eyes get use to the darkness in order to see what the dark has to teach us about ourselves and one another. Sometimes we need to befriend the dark, to bring us closer to one another and therefore connect to the light of love in all our lives. In so doing we can become the Immauels we have all been waiting for. Immanuel means that God is with us. With us in the darkness as well as the light. The darkness was there before there was light. In the darkness and love of our mother’s wombs, love was present. Just as it is present in the seeds that are planted in the dark earth that will sprout to life in the light of spring. We need not fear the dark and wait passively for the light to come, we must first befriend the dark and then become the light we have all been waiting for. Oh come, oh come Immanuel.

I have shared the following, “It is better to light one candle than curse the darkness”, with you before. It is an old Chinese proverb and has become the motto of Amnesty International. As we enter into the Advent season, I would like us to hold these words in our hearts. We live in cynical times, and it is easy to get caught up in negative thinking, to only see the troubles in life. The truth is there is much hope around us and within us, it’s just that we rarely focus light on it. This hope can be born again in manger of our hearts.

This Advent season I would like us think of ways in which we can bring a little light into the dark places of our world. Not so much the big things, but the little things. It is amazing how little things affect the lives of others in small and simple ways. Like the old man and his two granddaughters I witnessed the other morning, how they opened and awakened my heart and soul.

This Advent season I am asking us to become candles and lanterns, to bring some light into our world. To do what we can. To me this is living religiously; to me this is the essence of true religion. It’s not just about what we think, or feel, or believe or reject, it is a way of being; it is an orientation of the heart. It’s about spirit coming to life; it’s about spirit incarnating in our human form.

My hope is that we can be blessings to our world; that we can bring glad tidings of comfort and joy to our world. Our world needs it we all need it.

My request to you this Advent season is that do what we can to become blessings to all that we meet, to bring love alive in our lives. Let us also open ourselves up to the blessings this season offers to us, from one another and from all life, for that same spirit is present in everything. That spirit links us to the wholeness of life and the wholeness of eternity. It links us from our souls to the universal, to the eternal, soul.

O come, o come Immanuel. Immanuel means that God is still with us, may we recognise this in the love that is always with us. In both the darkness and the light. Let that love shine. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

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

Awakening to the Love of Winter

Winter comes in many forms in our lives. Whatever form it takes the universal response to winter is to hope that it will soon be over, to wish it all away. It is often a time of year that we want to pass through so as to once again reach the re-birth and renewal of spring. So many of us do not like the cold, the dark, the lifelessness of winter. How often do we wish that it was over?

We need winter though. We need the times of darkness and coldness. We need the stillness of winter too. We need this time of preparation. We need to slow down and reflect on what has been. We need to feel the cold and experience the fear and loneliness of the darkness to prepare ourselves for the light and the new life that is yet to come. We need to prepare for the new love that can be reborn in the spring time. We need to allow the new love to be born in our hearts once again and shine out onto our world. We need to remain open to this love in this the darkest and coldest time of the year.

I really felt the cold the other morning. It feels like winter. Yes I know that officially it is not until the 1st of December, but tell that to the air. I felt the cold of winter as I awoke to prepare myself for Advent and the weeks ahead.  Winter is here. I’m sure that we have all felt the cold of winter these last few days and nights. Each morning as I awaken it is still dark and as each day passes the light seems to turn back to dark oh so quickly. The days of light seem oh so far away. On days like this it is so easy to wish away the winter, to wish that it will quickly be over. It is hard, at times, to wait patiently for the coming of lighter and warmer days ahead.

In this darkest coldest season we celebrate the coming of the new light and the new life, exemplified in the birth of a child. A child that is born again in our own hearts when we live in love ourselves. “In the bleak mid-winter, in this world of pain where our hearts are open Christ is born again.”

This is what the season is for. To prepare ourselves for the new love that is yet to be born in the mangers of our own hearts. A time to wait for what is yet to come in the New Year.

So let us not wish this time of year to be over, even though it soon will be. Let us instead fully experience this time. Let us prepare for the new love waiting to be born in our own hearts and when the spring time comes let us pour out this Love on a world that so dearly needs this. For surely this is our task. To give birth to love that sleeps peacefully, these silent nights, in the mangers of our own hearts.

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.
This idea of waiting and nurturing of love brings to mind the following piece of wisdom by Paula Gooder.  She writes on pregnancy as a model of active and nurturing waiting, which she also sees as characteristic of the season of Advent and Hope.

“The Meaning Is in the Waiting :The Spirit of Advent” By Paula Gooder 

"As I waited for the birth of my baby, I discovered that waiting can be a nurturing time, valuable in its own right. Until then, I had assumed that waiting could only be passive, that it involved sitting around, drumming my fingers, completely powerless to do anything until the moment of waiting passed and I could be active again. How wrong I was. The waiting of pregnancy is about as active an occupation as one can hope to engage in. Pregnant waiting is a profoundly creative act, involving a slow growth to new life. This kind of waiting may appear passive externally but internally consists of never-ending action and is a helpful analogy for the kind of waiting that Advent requires. For many of us, Advent is such a busy time with all our preparations for Christmas that the thought of stopping and sitting passively — while attractive in many ways — is simply impossible. Advent, however, does not demand passivity but the utmost activity: active internal waiting that knits together new life.

"One of the other things I learned during pregnancy was that learning to savor the time of waiting allows us also to appreciate the event when it comes. The loss of an ability to wait often brings with it the inability to be fully and joyfully present now. Instead, we are constantly looking backward to better times we used to know and forward to better times that may be coming. The more we do this, the more we miss the present. Not only that, but it becomes hard to appreciate the future moment even when it does come. Many people speak of the feeling of deep anticlimax on Christmas Day when that long-anticipated day does not live up to expectations. Often the reason for this is that we live forever in the future, so that, when the future becomes the present, we are ill equipped to deal with it and have lost the ability to be fully present, right now.

"One of the many reasons we wait in Advent is to hone our skills of being joyfully and fully present now. After a month of doing this, Christmas Day can gain a depth and meaning that would otherwise fly past in a whirl of presents and mince pies."

I believe that Paula highlights some deeply important and spiritually enriching aspects of Advent, that can so easily be missed. If we wait patiently, but not passively, we will truly appreciate the day when it comes, as we will appreciate our lives when each new day comes. This waiting patiently but not passively will enable us to truly experience the gift that is our lives as it will truly allow us to not only live in the present, but to open the gift of the present, to truly give birth to it and to bring the present to life and thus truly experience what it is to be alive.

So let’s prepare ourselves for the moment of magic yet to come. Let’s nurture the love within us and prepare to give birth to it in our lives. Let’s not wish these dark cold days away. There is a beautiful gift in them if we allow ourselves to fully experience them. We need to experience each and every sensation of this season. Much like a mother who experiences the stirring of her baby in the womb we must experience each and every moment of this season before the moment of magic when the love is ready to once again be born.

If we do we will bring alive that love that is deep within each of us. If we prepare ourselves we will nurture that seed of love in all our hearts and we will bring it to life and therefore shine some light on the dark places in our lives and in our world. We can give birth to love in the mangers of our own hearts.

Becoming the Light

It is not difficult to look at the world in despair and cry out “There is no hope for humanity”. It is easy to say “what is the point? Darkness always overcomes it all.” It is easy to cry out “there is something deeply flawed in human nature that evil always seems to prevail.” It is so easy to accept those words from the Book of Common Prayer” “That there is no health in us.” It is easy to give up on it all and say “It is all going to rack and ruin”

I’ve done it myself. In fact it would be fair to say that for many years of my adult life I did just this. I gave up on life and I gave up on humanity. I allowed the light in my own being and in life itself to go out. I gave in. That was the easy way, the heartless way if truth be told. I had lost the courage to live and the courage to love and had become consumed by despair.

But thank God it did not stay that way. From that place of hopelessness, from that place of despair Hope somehow took root once again, light took hold in the dark cold places within my being. I have seen this happen in the lives of many others since. Light can prevail, if we let it. It is not easy though. To live in hope in some ways is the harder way. It takes love and it takes courage…To live in the way of love and life takes heart…

Now of course sometimes the light is lit by another. As Albert Schweitzer said “At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lit the flame within us”.

There are many who have rekindle the spark in me over the years. I hope that I done so in lives of others too.

It has been through experiencing the light once more coming on and witnessing it in the lives of others that keeps the fire of hope burning deep within me. We human beings are capable of incredible acts of love and compassion. I see this every day in my personal interactions and I also see it on a global level in the way that we do respond to the horrors and crisis that we witness in our lives both locally and globally. We humans are capable of such goodness.

The key is to believe and to bring that belief to fruition that we are capable of deep caring as well as destructive aggression; that we are just as capable of good as we are of evil. By the way I mean all of us, not just some of us. I do believe that we are formed from Divine love and that we have that Divine spark that created the beginning of all life within us; that we are all formed from that Original Goodness; that we all have that same stardust within us. Our problem is that we have forgotten this and or rejected it. When we do this we turn from a love for all life into a rejection and hatred of life itself. To me this is where the darkness, the evil in life comes from. From rejecting life and the love from which we are all formed.

…The darkness grows when we fail to recognise that we are the light of the world…

It is our task, I believe, to rekindle that loving flame within each and every one of us. It is our task to become the Immanuel's, the ones that the world has been waiting for. Not to wait for some figure to come and rescue humanity, but to become those people ourselves, to let love incarnate within us and through us. To bear witness to the fact that God is already with us, in our hearts and souls and to bring that love to life. We must become the Immanuel’s, the ones we have all been waiting for.

It is so easy to sink into despair and say, there is no hope for humanity, but is this true? I don’t think so, but it is up to us. There is no point just waiting for something to happen, it is we who must become the savours of our world and it begins in our own hearts and minds, in our own families and in our own communities and then it may begin to spread throughout the whole world. It is our task to bring the spirit of love alive in our lives and in our times and places. It is our task to become the Immanuel’s.

…We must become the light of the world…

We can build temples of hope in all our hearts, in spite of the despair that we see within our own lives and those all around us. We can bring love alive once more. We can light the flame within us and rekindle the flame in those who need it the most, who feel close to giving up, who feel consumed by despair. We can become the blessing that our world has been waiting for.

…We can become the light of the world…

Amen

The Light of Hope: Which Wolf Wins?

I can only imagine what it must be like to experience utter darkness. I was only a baby during the power cuts of the early 1970’s and therefore have no memory of them. And like most folk of my generation I have seen the images and been told the stories of the war time blackouts, but still I cannot really imagine what it must have been like walking those dark streets. The lights did go out in my home for a short time last year and I have to say I found it very difficult negotiating my way around the house, without anything to guide my way.

It’s pretty scary trying to find your way in the dark. No one likes to feel helpless, hopeless sightless. When we stumble around “in a land of darkness” we cannot protect ourselves and just end up stumbling around our own homes stubbing our toes or falling over furniture. That said it is not only material darkness that can cause us problems, we can also get lost in those metaphorical dark forests of life. This can be terrifying. The book of life is full of stories describing children getting lost in the woods. Those fairy tales explore universal themes that everyone can relate to. After all don't we all feel lost and or confused at times.

When we fall into one of life’s black holes we can lose all hope. In this pit we can begin to compromise the very values that we are trying to live by. In this darkness we can lose our dreams and our goals we can forget the path we are on and why we have chosen it. We can also lose sight of our security and supportive community as we search in the dark unaware of the many pitfalls. Sometimes we drive people away with our fear or perhaps they just walk away because they cannot stand our pain.

Perhaps there is another way; perhaps there is a way out. Even in the deepest darkness light can be found; the light of hope, which can show us a new way. This light cannot be resisted it is constantly revealing itself as life continues its re-birth. Isn't this what the season of Advent is all about, the preparation for the coming of the light.

Children bring that light into so many people’s lives. And of course it is the image of a child on which Advent and Christmas rest. The coming of Immanuel the child sent to rescue the people of Israel from their darkness.

I don’t accept this stories uniqueness; I do not believe that this is once in humanity’s life span thing. Sophia Lyon Fahs is so right when she says “Every Night a Child is Born is a Holy Night.” The potential of every child brings hope; no one can remain completely lost if they can just glimpse this hope. There is that of God in each and every one of us. We all have the potential for great things, if we just nurture that loving compassion within us; we just need a little bit of hope and a sprinkling of faith to show us the way; we just need appropriate nurture. We know this from our own lives and we know it from the lives of those that have walked in the light before us. Even in our darkest hours there is a hidden strength that can be found, often from an unexpected source. All that we have to do is to let that light shine in and through us. Advent is a time of anticipation and as long as we hope, someone will light a candle against the prevailing darkness "and neither the winds of hate nor the gales of evil will extinguish it.” This light is universal and it is eternal.

The light of Universalism continues to speak powerfully to me. The concept of one light and many windows that my great hero Forrest Church spoke so beautifully about, keeps me humble and therefore open. I accept that I will never know the absolute truth about everything or even anything and that this enables me to experience life in a way I could never have imagined. The one light of God or truth is reflected through a variety of windows, which none of us can see directly or perfectly.

Universalism’s message of hope, of the everlasting love of God, also speaks to me. It brings Psalm 139 powerfully to the fore of my thinking, nothing and no one is beyond the reach of this eternal love. The dark and the light are both the same to this eternal love. We cannot escape it completely; we cannot flee from the range and reach of this eternal and universal love.

It is so easy to look at our world and just despair and give in and say we are doomed and lost in our own darkness. It is so easy to see life this way. Is this true though are we lost in despair? Is there no hope?

Tom Owen-Towle’s “The Gospel of Universalism: Hope, Courage and the Love of God” has helped me to understand that hope and despair share the same root, that they are joined together like Siamese twins. In the French language they share the same linguistic root; hope (espair) and despair (desespair).

To live in hope, to live in faith that we all have that light etched into our DNA, is not to deny life’s difficulties and pain. Instead it is to see the realities of who and what we are and what our true potential can be, if we just nurture it correctly. All we have to do is let that light shine that is there within us all. This sounds simple, but it is far from easy. It requires consistent effort to allow that natural compassion to grow, develop and nurture. We have to do it though because otherwise the other parts of ourselves take over and we turn with indifference from life. The opposite of hope is not despair, it is indifference.

I have written many times about the work of Karen Armstrong, the Charter for Compassion and her book “12 Steps to a Compassionate Life”. Her central theme is this concept of nurturing our compassionate natures; that this nurture of compassion is a universal theme central to all the great religious traditions throughout human history. This is a message of hope and it is an eternal and universal theme.

Hope springs eternal all we have to do is to begin to let our little lights shine. Isn't this what Advent is all about, the illumination of hope.

I will end this little chip of a blog with a story I have shared here before. I do love the tale and I believe it is worth repeating.

One winter’s evening whilst gathered round a blazing camp fire, an old Sioux Indian chief told his grandson about the inner struggle that goes on inside people.

“You see” said the old man, “this inner struggle is like two wolves fighting each other. One is evil, full of anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, deceit, false pride, superiority, and ego”.

“The other one,” he continued, poking the fire with a stick so that the fire crackled, sending the flames clawing at the night sky, “is good, full of joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith”.

For a few minutes his grandson pondered his grandfather’s words and then asked, “So which wolf wins, grandfather?”

“Well”, said the wise old chief, his lined face breaking into a wry smile, “The one you feed!”