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Advent 2: In the words of its making

Peace be with you.


Peace like a river; an evening paddling down, the river flat and black, chimney swifts swooping down in ashen shadow, clouds of insects wound tight into balls about eye level, the sound of rushing water. All of this a season–no, two seasons–ago. Floating with the current, the brookies and browns and smallmouths slipping beneath undercut banks, disappearing into dark pools to sleep, their shadows impossible to discern, their gills slowing to an ancient rhythm, in and out. Breathe in, breathe out.

Inner peace. The sharpness of a gunshot in the December twilight, sharp and lonesome is the report, the sound racing up the cove and bouncing off these old stone hills and racing back to share. It is a massive sound, close enough to wonder who is hunting so close to the house, but then I remember that we live in a national forest, that out here it might be a fellow stalking a deer, and it might be someone putting down something lame, and it might be just the neighbor shooting down mistletoe. We think of gunfire as anathema to peace, and for a few breaths my afternoon stops in its tracks, my ears perked up, but soon the sounds of the world around me relax, return, and all of that tension leaves.

Advent 1: Point Nemo

When lighthouses go dark.


In the early dark of December, I recall walking down to St. David’s in Cullowhee. I was a college student, a junior I think, and it was Advent. My friend Brittany had been invited to read a meditation she’d composed, and we were both going.

These meditations were a weekly occurrence at St. David’s. We arrived in the cold, entering into the nave directly from the red door at the side. Inside was a narrow room with a vaulted ceiling. The Advent evening prayer services were candlelit; there was a podium in the aisle for reading. A chest organ at the back provided some music. Dr. Lillian Pearson–Kelly’s piano professor–usually supplied.

I cannot remember the subject of Brittany’s meditation. I can only guess it was something literary. (We were English majors.) But the reason I was there in the first place had more to do with the rector who led the parish.

While He May Be Found

Dall-e made an image for me of someone lost in the wilderness.

God is not Time and Temperature


Episcopalians who are familiar with the Morning Prayer liturgy may remember in its Rite II form a canticle that comes from the second of Isaiah’s four servant songs.

Seek the Lord while he may be found;
call on him while he is near.
Let the wicked forsake their ways
and the unrighteous their thoughts.
Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them,
and to our God, for he will freely pardon.

ISaiah 55:6-7

Isaiah is a regular stop on the Advent cycle. During this season, in fact, the Morning Prayer liturgy opens with two different pieces of scripture from this book. They offer two ideas: that we are in the wilderness, and that God will soon reveal himself to us.

You might remember the prophet Isaiah from the token verse of his calling. God asked who he should send, and Isaiah answered, “Here am I! Send me!” I admit that as a child, whatever I assigned to Isaiah in my brain was dramatically reduced to lines like that–but it’s worth remembering that this prophet lived and wrote some 800 years before the birth of Christ. The book’s narrative essence follows a time of captivity, a time of punishing Babylonian captivity and exile, and afterward, a time of restoration.

I receive a daily Advent meditation by email, and this morning’s scripture was Isaiah 55:6-13, which begins with the passage quoted above. For some reason, the first sentence landed differently: Seek the Lord while he may be found.

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