Tag: Advent

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Advent joy

Joy

It was interesting on Sunday because our church’s “Joy” candle struggled to light. I think it was a prophetic sign that joy is one of the hardest things we can grasp this year. There’s so much going on – wars and rumours of wars – and has been really since 2020 [the year of perfect vision] things just seem to have been spiralling downwards, or so the media would have us believe.

Even if we don’t grasp it for ourselves I think we find praying for peace and love in the world is something we can and should be doing. I think even when we get to hope we can manage that. But joy when things like the Bondi beach shooting happens, when children are kidnapped to be child soldiers, when sea levels are rising that poorest are losing out, then Joy is a hard, and feels almost callous to pray.

Interesting too that it is a different colour. I wonder if that is because whoever picked the colours in the first place knew that Joy would be of a different nature?

But I do wonder if the reason we have to keep coming back to Love, Peace, Joy and Hope is that we keep forgetting it. And we keep thinking it is up to us to manufacture it. But it isn’t. It is by leaning on God that we find these things. And at this season we need to be leaning into the promised Joy that was promised with the birth of Jesus which gets hidden further and further from the actual Christmas.

Much as I do not agree with the things Tommy Robinson is saying around his slogan of bringing “the Christ back into Christmas” I do agree that we need to bring Christ back into Christmas. When I was young all you seemed to be able to buy were Christmas cards with some from the Nativity story on them. Now it is harder and harder to find anything remotely Nativity based. And it isn’t people of other religions, young people, etc who are shying away from this. I was at a local writing group, made up mainly of white middle class retired men and women and we had 3 writing exercises over a 2 hours workshop, all Christmas based, and yet, apart from one I did, there was not a single nativity based story came from it.

So I do wonder if, in and out of Church, we forget Jesus and we try to muster all these things in our own strength which is why that poor old Joy candle spluttered and went out and had to be relit a few times. I think maybe we need to put the Real Jesus – the one of love, of acceptance, of caring for the poor, the fatherless, the refugee, the one who loved the WHOLE world – back into Christmas.

I’m going to finish with a quote from Christine Sine that helped me make sense of what is being asked with Joy

Then I realized: Is the problem that my understanding of the joy of Advent is all wrong? This is not a joy of happiness or of fulfillment, but a joy of anticipation. It is best expressed in the middle of disaster and heartache and violence that destroys nature and people and cultures. In the midst of these things, our hearts long for the fulfillment promised in the birth of Christ. And in that longing we respond in whatever way we can

Meditation Monday – What’s All This About Joy?

So I will take joy in the anticipation that what was promised at Christ’s birth – the joy to the whole world, the Christ at the beginning, middle and end of Christmas – will come to pass and wars and hatred will cease. In that I place my joy this season.

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christmas mindfulness

Advent! Preparing!

View from my window. December letting us know it has arrived by giving us our first real frost of the year. Taken by myself 1st Dec 2023

I am going to be honest – like I am most of the time on here – I struggle with all this Advent prep, all this talk of preparing for Christmas, all this having decorations out more than a week before Christmas, etc. So whilst I was walking I was pondering why do I feel like that.

Since doing more of this QEC stuff and the ANSing I have realised that for every thing that feels like a “gut reaction” there is generally something in me that causes it. Sometimes it can be from my past but sometimes it can be just from who I am or from the emerging me.

So some of the reason I struggle with this long lead up to things is that I am not very good at keeping something up for six weeks unless there is someone keeping an eye on me doing it, some sort of reward. So if I do a devotional book I get fed up after a while. With NaNoWriMo I managed until 23rd November, which is a record for me, but couldn’t make it to 30th. Fault in me? Or just how I am?

I am trying to live in the moment, be mindful, enjoy the now – to listen to that still small voice of God/The Universe/my heart – and not be rushing off to the next thing, which I think is what is bugging me about there being so so much chatter from Church, shops, media, and even some TV programs already having decorations up.

My daughter asked me yesterday if I’d got anywhere with Christmas present shopping because son and his wife had asked us what we wanted about 2 weeks ago! I had to say that I hadn’t given it much thought as there had been other things going on – preparing my husband to go off to America for 10 days work this week, my lodger leaving to go to her newly bought flat, thinking of when to visit my Mum before Christmas, getting used to not working, and just enjoying life in the slow lane.

For me with Christmas, when my children were little we used to wait till 1st December to start any form of Christmas talk. [Even now they are only allowed to talk about their birthdays a month before the event] So there were no home school Christmas activities till 1st or talk of presents or what we were going to do or anything. Decorations would go up around 19th December and it would be a thing we did together. Yes because I was on a very low income I used to have various savings schemes in the butchers, the supermarket, the toy shop, saving from January. But the event itself didn’t enter the fray till 1st December. Whereas this year I feel like from every angle, whether Christian or secular, I am being bombarded with Christmas – from giving to buying to thinking about how to spreading good cheer.

One of the big things about helping with one’s mental health is to live in the moment, to enjoy today for today, to be mindful of the now rather than worrying about tomorrow or yesterday. But what I feel with all this Christmas prep hype, whether good things or not, is that it is starting earlier and earlier and so we are living in the “oh my goodness it’s coming” state of mind rather than, like a good holiday, knowing it is around the corner but not making it a big thing until it gets closer.

As I saw on FB this morning, someone was saying how they are grateful every day and live in today so why should they be doing this end of year stuff. [Interestingly even this end of year stuff is coming earlier and earlier each year. At one time things like Sports Personality of the Year, film reviews for the year, music reviews of the year, etc would all happen in the week between Christmas and New Year or even in the first few days on the new year. ]

So I am not being a Scrooge and I do like Christmas but please, please, please can we start to have all the Christmas hype – whether from Church or elsewhere – nearer to the day rather than 6 or more weeks in advance?

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Shrove Tuesday spring St David's Day

1st March – St David’s Day

Spring flowers photographed in and around my local area taken by myself

Today is St David’s Day – the patron saint of Wales. It is also Shrove Tuesday or Pancake day – the start of Lent in the Christian calendar, at least in the West. And it is the start of Spring. I have also decided that I am going to try my hardest and post one blog post every month. I had read in WordPress’ newsletter that there had been a Bloganuary, which I’d missed. But then I have never been good at doing things when other people did. I never do my month of non-alcoholic drinking during SoberOctober but pick another time period. When I was young and my friends were all going to see some film that was raved about I wouldn’t go, just because it was popular!!! So starting yesterday I’m going to attempt daily postings for a month. I do have 12 prompts all ready to go.

So today’s key days – St David, Shrove Tuesday and 1st day of Spring – are a mix of joy and grief days, especially Shrove Tuesday. This was a day when any of the good food stuffs were still in the store cupboard after a long winter would be made into a meal and eaten in preparation for the fasting of Lent. So it was a celebratory day knowing that for the next 40 days [excluding Sundays and Saint’s days] there would be fasting so hearts would be sorted to remember the crucifixion of Jesus.

As I typed that I was wondering how much easier things would be if we could prepare ourselves for a time of grief or conflict. What if we’d knowing just over 2 years ago that there would be this world shattering pandemic? What would we have done in preparation? How would we have sorted out our hearts? With this with the Russian invasion – which some say was coming for a while – how should we have prepared our hearts?

Do we ever think to prepare our hearts or do we just rushing into things reacting? Did people take life slower in some bygone age? With the times of Lent and Advent one does wonder if they did. I know with both Lent and Advent that is a time of remembering rather than and event happening so that is the difference. That at the time when these periods of mourning were set in place much of Europe was tearing itself apart with war after war after war.

Pick any period in history and some country was invading some other country, some people group was fighting some other people group. This that we are enduring is NOT new. It is just that we have been able to ignore it for a long time because, apart from the Balkan war in the 1990s there has been no fighting in European soil since 1945. But if one looks across the rest of the world even during the 22 years of this century someone is fighting someone whether governments or so called rebel forces or whatever. Sadly also today in 1954 the US tested a 15 megatonne bomb – 15 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima – in the Pacific archipelago of Bikini. So may be we should be preparing our hearts more.

But also this is the time to celebrate the legend of St David. He was pretty amazing, pretty fearless and I do wonder if, even though he did not know what would happen next,he had his heart always prepared, facing towards God and the mighty power the being aligned with the Creator of the Universe.

So how do we do that? I’ve got some prompt that I’ll hopefully get to over the next month but I think firstly it is to slow things down, to wait and not react – whether that is to what we read in the news, in personal affairs, in the things we do – so that when we do move we can move wholeheartedly trusting in ourselves and that we are in alignment with the Universe and not – as Putin seems to be doing – working against the good of mankind as a whole.

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Feel the seasons solstice

Winter Solstice

This post first appeared on https://godspacelight.com/2021/12/21/winter-solstice/

view of sunrise across a field photographed by Diane Woodrow
Sunrise photographed by myself on a morning dog walk

I wrote an article during our “lockdown Christmas” last year about my feelings regarding winter and slowing down. I also wrote an article in 2017 about the Winter Solstice and how the sun stands still for the few days from solstice to Christmas day. So it looks as if I have a bit of an affinity with this time of year.

I do love the roll into winter. I love the ways the days get rapidly shorter and I have to rethink my dog walking times because by 4pm it isn’t fun to walk around the park. Though I also love that if I can get out before 7.30am I can watch the sun rise over the trees in the park. This is a time when I just pray out loud giving glory to God. Christine talked about the Wow factor of Advent and for me every sunrise is a “Wow!” factor.

This morning I was blown away by starting my walk only lit by street-lighting, but then seeing the clouds start to get tinged with light and come into definition. Even though the sun still hadn’t fully risen by the time I got home the world had come into definition. That to me is so awesome. It truly is “new every morning” and I can then remember “Great is his faithfulness” [Lamentations 3:23] So no matter what my mood when I start my walk I come to a place of being with God and giving my morning over before I return home.

I noticed this last year and again this year, people are putting their outdoor Christmas lights on earlier and earlier. I know some of it has been said that because with the pandemic, and other things, life is bleak so people need lights, but the posts by Liz of Pocket Fuel have made me think. In the daily emails for the first week of December she explored how we seem to no longer embrace the darkness as our ancestors would have and how from that we miss out on things – like trusting God in the darkness.

It got me thinking about our ancestors, and I’m talking pre-Industrial revolution, would use the winter season was a time for gathering the family, of sharing the tales that made up their culture. This is when the stories were retold about heroes, monsters, family history, how the earth came into being, etc. But now we have made the winter, especially this run up to Christmas so busy, whether that is rushing round buying, partying, Church services. It is all busy, busy, busy, when in fact our bodies are crying out for us to slow down and the next generation needs to hear our stories, our history, our faith tales.

I am lucky in that in my freelancing work I have being healed of the need to see planning and money as the driving force and have moved more into trusting God to provide so I am more able to roll with the seasons and the daylight hours. But I still have had to think through how not to get sucked into being busy in church, feeling guilty for not saying Yes to everything, for making a quieter way. It isn’t easy. It is countercultural. It takes focus but I was trying.

So as I allow this season and this shortest day to enfold me I listen to my heart – because it is my heart that connects me with God – and then ask my heart what it is thinking and feeling. I breath and pray and then feel safe. And I also want to learn all this so I can take the slowness of the darker season into the spring and summer.

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choice hope joy

Choose Joy

View of autumnal leaves of the tree outside my house taken by Diane Woodrow
View from my study window today

It is the start of the Celtic Advent. Celtic Advent gives 40 days run up to Christmas and then on into Epiphany. I like it because it gives time to reflect and ponder without some of the same intensity as the Anglican Advent time of just that mad December rush to Christmas.

In today’s reading Christine Sine encourages one to “choose joy”. As I looked out of my study window to the gold and oranging leaves of the cherry tree, my constant companion through all the seasons I think it is easy to choose joy today. It is easy to choose joy when there is beauty just outside my window, when I can go and walk in the beautiful park ten minutes from my house and enjoy the changing colours of the glorious autumn season. But how does one choose joy when life isn’t so beautiful?

Yet even when there is beauty around one still has to choose whether to see the glorious colours or to see that they signify impending death. As this season turns around again it is easy sometimes to see what hasn’t been done – the minimal progress at COP26, the impending next covid wave, etc ,etc. Or the path that was blocked or the job that hasn’t happened or the relationship that has gone awry.

But what is joy anyway? The Bible says “The joy of the Lord is your strength” Note it is the Lord’s joy not you trying to be happy clappy that is your strength. And I think that’s the depth of and truth of it all whether you believe in God or not, that you don’t have to build up that joy yourself but just need to turn to it, to accept it.

I read this from a blog post this morning. It is from Alcoholic’s Anonymous, which I seem to be coming across more and more these days in things I’m reading and I am sharing it with the young Youthshedz people I am working with

We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace.

Call it what you wish – peace, joy, or as the Youthshedz girls were telling me the other day, hope – but you have to choose to walk in it. It is there all the time just waiting for you to reach for it, just waiting for you to accept it.

I’m learning a lot from these young people who have gone through so so much at such a young age and yet they have chosen hope. Ok so not all the time and they have down days and bad days, which is fine. If we are honest then we all have those days, though maybe not so openly, but they make an effort to choose hope/joy/peace.

So as the tree outside my window will soon cast its leaves to the ground and stand bare before me, even though the joy/hope looks like it has gone, I will, no matter what this next busy season throws at me, choose joy, choose peace, choose love, choose hope. It isn’t going to be easy but if these young people can do it then I certainly can.