Advent pathways

The lectionary readings this week contain the famous Prepare Ye the Way comments from Isaiah 40. I googled "pathways" looking for a picture to put on the Advent mural at the front of the church.

Guess what I got pictures of?

Yep many pretty pathways to quiet English lanes, a few desert pathways as befitted the reading and rather unexpectedly several diagrams of neural pathways (and other sorts of circuit diagrams)

Which got me thinking about the interior pathways that need to be prepared during Advent...waiting isn't just a matter of sitting still (or pacing up and down the train platform).

As Cheryl says, real waiting is holding the space. And physiologically speaking preparing the way is actually remapping the neural pathways which, in my head at least, circumnavigate my brain by the millisecond helping me to do everything but hold the space.

Hopefully Darren will blog about the external pathways which we need to prepare but for me at this point, how do I prepare the inner pathways, past the "seeming to wait", to the real stillness of listening waiting at the heart of Advent? What are the wilderness parts of my mind which need to be straightened out and built up to enable Christ to be born in me this Christmas?

Advent Advances

Well here i am again - dashing through Advent.

It's supposed to be the waiting time, the time to wait as the world grows daily darker juxtaposing the coming of the Christ light - except down here of course where even the daylight is stretching itself to encompass the world.

Light of the world we await you indeed, await you in the unexpected places, await you in the places we think of as already lit; and await you in the places where the darkness is almost complete and we secretly think you will never come. give us thinking in our waiting.

A Baptismal Kind of A Day

Sometimes you think you've got the sneak preview, think you've seen the best of what the week's service will hold,. I thought I'd heard it in the uncensored response of faith in the voice of a seven year old a week previously.

That was before the service. In the baptismal preparation, I asked the child to be baptised why they wanted to do this. She didn't hesitate for a minute - "because I want to be part of this family". It was pure and profound and it did give me great pleasure to baptise her. I hugged her response to myself as I prepared the service.

So I wasn't watching for the second faith. I had written in a role for her sister because I wanted to affirm the household of faith (my theological comfort zone) in the face of the baptism of children. I asked the question - as an important part of her life will you promise to keep encouraging and supporting your sister and help her to keep the promises she's made today?

Her response was to be the ritual "with God's help I will". But it wasn't me doing the scripting for this one. The truly spirit bit came in the actions - as she said those words to me she bent down and hugged her sister - totally unaffected, the underlining of the relationship and the reality of the words.

And I stood before them and cried. I get it now...Baptism as sacrament.

That's what good worship does - it creates a space for that to happen; to shapes words which can come alive; a makes a moment memorable.