Arrival or journey?

Are you looking forward to Christmas?

‘Watch, Prepare, Rejoice, Behold’ – four themes of advent, each word written on one of the Advent candles in the banner which hangs in the church at this time of year.

It’s a time when we look forward to the coming of the king.

We await the arrival of Baby Jesus, winding ourselves back in time, anticipating the promised nativity. We look ahead in faith to the future coming of the king at the end of time, although we can’t imagine what this will be like. And we reflect on the king’s coming among us now, day by day, to all whose hearts are open and also to those in whose hearts there is the smallest beginning of openness,

Advent is the beginning of the annual journey through the Church Year by way of many festivals, the major ones being Christmas, Easter, Pentecost. The journey also leads through routine days of ‘ordinary time.’

A friend of mine told me about the reaction to his finding Christian faith as a teenager of a group of young people he met with regularly. Most of them probably reflecting the viewpoint of their church traditions, hailed his conversion as an arrival. One, a perceptive girl with an Episcopalian background told him ‘this is just the beginning.’

And she was right. Finding faith in Jesus is certainly an arrival, but it’s an arrival at the beginning of an on-going journey. It’s only a genuine arrival if it is the first step of a journey.

In my past experience, Christians who focused on conversion as ‘arrival’ didn’t hold Christmas and Easter and Pentecost as particularly special. ‘Don’t we remember Christ’s birth and death and resurrection, and his presence in the Spirit every Sunday?’  they would say.

Now it’s good to remember that in Christ God gives as everything we will ever need, but a thankful appreciation of the spiritual provisioning we receive through faith can easily turn to a blasé sense that we know it all, while in fact we may have forgotten so much, and lost touch with the reality behind even the things we do remember.

And that’s why the theme of Christian faith as ‘journey’ is so meaningful to me. As we travel in faith we find our unique identity, we discover our God-given destiny, we learn new things through life-changing experiences which are only learned that way and so can’t be given on day one of the journey. We learn, we forget, we re-learn, we see things we’ve always known from new angles and perspectives as we climb the spiral staircase towards the flame at the top of the lighthouse.

Many Christians find that living through the Church calendar every year is a stimulus to journeying. Imaginatively, we live in real time through the experiences of those caught up in the first Christmas, the first Easter, the first Pentecost. We are humbled and enriched by these reflections, and also confront the challenges of living for God in ‘ordinary time.’

For some of us, this Christmas, this Advent will be the beginning of a journey. Some of us will come to Jesus for the first time and sense God drawing close to us as we draw close to God. For others it will be a stimulus to keep journeying forward together, as we focus on a God who has come among us, a God who will come, a God who connects with us now, bringing light into whatever dark place we currently passing through.

This Sunday, we’ll be lighting the third Advent candle.  Rejoice!

Welcome, King of Kings!

(From the Hilton Church of Scotland blog)

The gift of now

Here I am reflecting that while I have learned a new lesson, I have forgotten, or stopped living the truth of something I already know.

The new lesson is this. I had assumed that the only people who were entitled to speak with conviction about how accepting your mortality enriches your appreciation of the now were those with a terminal illness, who know the number of days or months they can expect to live. But I now understand that each one of us, if we accept that our physical life is finite, can experience a richer joy in living - each day is one of a limited number of days, each summer one of a limited number of summers. Our awareness of the preciousness of these gifts is heightened by our knowledge that their number is finite. It seems to me that accepting that we will die is, for all of us, the key to a deeper experience of living.

As a Christian, I find that faith is the portal to this richer experience of living in the face of death. For I believe that death is not the end, rather the beginning of a life purer in its richness than anything we can know in the here-and-now, and I also believe that as a friend of Christ, I am accepted, loved, cherished by the Father.

But that’s the lesson I’ve forgotten. I have learned countless times that I don’t need to create self-worth by actions because my identity is founded on the love of a God who accepts me, forgivingly, as I am. And yet again I detect dubious motives in some of my actions – am I driven to do this thing in order to win praise, or does it flow naturally from a self secure on the foundation of divine acceptance? Do I do things for others, apparently altruistically, but in fact to win their appreciation?

I know that I best use my remaining days when I act freely from a secure, God-founded identity rather than from an edgy need to generate self-worth. How easy it is to forget this! How easy it is to know it at one level, and yet to act differently.

Sometimes you watch someone over a time, and there are days when they are calm and sweet, other days when they are devious and unreasonable, and you wonder which days reflect their true nature. Of course, their true nature includes both the sweetness and the shadow, for we are all of us a complex amalgam of good and bad motives, darkness and light.

And as such, we are accepted and loved and worked on creatively by the Father. And it is that acceptance which enables us to face with courage and hope the dark gateway to a new dimension where there is no shadow, and where, perhaps it will be easier not to forget the many new lessons which will be there for the learning. A dimension where there is no limit to the number of days gifted and yet no restriction on our appreciation of their richness.

Reassurance

I love lying in bed on cold, dark mornings and listening as the gas boiler kicks in. ‘All is well!’ The same reassurance as you might have felt when lullabied in an ocean-going liner by the distant throb of the engines. Or on the Caledonian sleeper bearing you home from Euston by the rhythm of wheel on rail-joint. Something deep in me is soothed by the boiler’s ignition. Perhaps it’s fanciful, but I wonder if I subconsciously recall the months before I was born, the pulse of that life-giving heartbeat. 

One small planet in an immense, cold cosmos. Out there, is there simply silence, or can we, if we listen, discern a sustaining pulse, a benevolent purposefulness, cadences of that love song most memorably vocalised by the sweet singer of Golgotha?