Waiting for God

And so once more the wheel of the year has turned

and we are back at the beginning,
at this time of waiting.
Four weeks of waiting.
…
We have turned aside to this patch of holy ground
to sit and wait
at this time precisely set aside, like Lent,
for waiting.

Four weeks now of waiting.
Four weeks!
the insistent world in which we live
would have us want things now,
with the click of a button
and the blink of an eye.
But we have turned aside to wait,
in God’s good time.

So what are we waiting for?
waiting for God to come and take us home,
to lead us up her garden path,
past trees of Wisdom and of Life,
to open wide the door,
to cheer our spirits
chase off the gloomy clouds of night,
to close the path to misery,
put on the kettle,
sit us down to tea and cake
and make us laugh.
…

Waiting for God is surely a strange occupation,
for God is all about us
in the wild skies,
the clouds unravellled by the wind,
the sun that turns the trees to to gold and sea to duck-egg blue,
in the gorse that flowers even in frost,
the shades of winter bracken,
the lifted wings of swans,
the cries of whiffling geese,
in the kindness of strangers,
in acts of unexpected courtesy,
in the fresh companionship of old friends,
…
How can we wait for a God who has already arrived?

Because things are not all sweetness and light.
…
We have other tales to tell, if we dare tell them,
and we, we are not shivering in the cold of Kashmir,
nor striving to survive Mugabe’s madness,
nor are we high-walled and roadblocked in Bethlehem.
Sometimes it seems God is more than just four weeks away.

And so we wait.
We all wait.

excerpts from ‘Waiting for God’ by Trevor Dennis from his book The Christmas Stories

~~~

Original post from the excellent Love Blooms Bright Blog...

Advent Antiphons - White as Snow

And so Advent begins. This afternoon we sang the wonderful carol 'O Come, O Come Emmanuel' which is in turn based on the traditioanal 'O Antiphons.'

The O Antiphons are Magnificat Antiphons used at Vespers of the last seven days of Advent.
Each antiphon is a name of Christ, one of his attributes mentioned in Scripture. They are:
• December 17: O Sapientia (O Wisdom)
• December 18: O Adonai (O Adonai)
• December 19: O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse)
• December 20: O Clavis David (O Key of David)
• December 21: O Oriens (O Dayspring)
• December 22: O Rex Gentium (O King of the nations)
• December 23: O Emmanuel (O Emmanuel)

The importance of the "O Antiphons" is twofold. First, each one is a title for the Messiah. Secondly, each one refers to the prophesy of Isaiah of the coming of the Messiah. It's one of my fave hymns of all time. It took me back also to a song by U2 called 'White as Snow' on their 'No Line on the Horizon' cd. The melody of the song echoes the melody of the hymn we sung today.

A quick google search found an article that I remember reading on The Guardian Music Blog
which I copy below:

When I interviewed Bono in Dublin back in January, as part of my marathon tracking of the new U2 album, No Line On the Horizon, for Sunday's Observer Music Monthly, he described it as "essentially a big fat rock album". The most dramatic exception is a track called White As Snow, the quietest, most intimate, and arguably most arresting song that U2 have ever made.

"There are a couple of songs from the point of view of an active soldier in Afghanistan," Bono told me back in June 2008, at the group's Hanover Quay studio in Dublin, during a break in recording, "and one of them, White As Snow, lasts the length of time it takes him to die".

Of all the character songs on the album, White As Snow is the most moving. Much of this is to do with its sense of quietude – not a mood one normally associates with U2. The song is almost ambient in its musical pulse, suggesting the presence of Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, and Bono's voice sounds markedly different here, more restrained, more plaintive, the emotion suggested rather than strained for.

The song's melody is based on an old hymn, Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel, that, according to The Handbook to the Lutheran Hymnal, was composed by "an unknown author, circa 1100". (Surprisingly, the original has been faithfully covered by both Sufjan Stevens and Belle & Sebastian and, less surprisingly, by Enya and 2006's BBC Young Chorister of the Year, William Dutton).

The idea of a song based on the dying thoughts of a soldier initially came to Bono after he read William Golding's ambitious novel, Pincher Martin, which is told from the point of view of a British sailor who appears to have survived the torpedoing of his ship. As he approaches death, his thoughts roam back over his life, and the moral choices he made or avoided. (The novel's denouement, though, suggests that the soldier died at the moment his ship went down and that the preceding narrative recounts his soul's struggle to stay in the material world.)

After watching Sam Mendes's film, Jarhead, Bono decided the song should evoke the thoughts of a soldier dying from a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. Intriguingly, you don't really need to know the context for the song to work. It stands alone. Initially, I had assumed it was sung in the voice of a young Middle Eastern man who had been driven into exile, but there you go.

I am not typically taken with songs that require prior knowledge or context to be fully appreciated. I remember interviewing Elvis Costello on the release of his dense and difficult album, Spike, and being baffled even more by his explanations of the songs than the songs themselves. Springsteen, on the other hand – and, in particular, Springsteen the quiet balladeer – is a master of setting and context: "My name is Joe Roberts, I work for the state, I'm a sergeant out in Perrineville, Barracks number 8" . There is something about writing in character – putting yourself in someone else's place and seeing the world though someone else's eyes – that requires a certain craft and economy for that shift in perspective to be credible.

"We were going to start White As Snow with an explosion," recalled Bono. "An early version had this industrial noise that sounded like the aftermath of a bomb." Now, that would have been one way of getting around the problem of context. It may have worked, too, but the song is fine the way it is, unadorned, evocative, suggestive. You don't have to know what it's about to feel its quiet power or sense its sadness. "It's kind of pastoral,"
said Bono. It bodes well for the album that will follow No Line On the Horizon, which has, he says, "the idea of pilgrimage at its centre", and is made up of the "quieter, more meditative songs" that did not make it on to this one. "Intimacy is the new punk rock," Bono added, laughing. But is it the new stadium rock?

The 'O Antiphons' as special because, '...[i]n English as it is spoken in our communities, the vocative O is never used in the same way we see it here. Thankfully, liturgical language preserves a kind of impatient address for us with the O, opening our mouths and our eyes at the same time as we talk to a person. When we sing and pray, the O is followed often by the petition for someone to come and join us: O come, let us sing unto the Lord. O come, O come, Emmanuel. O come, all ye faithful. The O — and these Os — arranges our mouths and hopes around specific persons and special ends. We had not noticed before this year that in addition to bringing together Hebrew prophecies about the coming of the Christ Child, the antiphons include a substantial pre-Christmas wish-list. When we pray them, we ask — not always disguising our impatience very well — for instruction in the way of prudence; for redemption with an outstretched arm; for deliverance; for the release of prisoners out of the prison house; for enlightenment and for salvation. There is not a bicycle or toy train set in sight, nor a giftcard, nor clothing, nor even an iPod....' (that snippet is taken from here)

But perhaps they do sum up the hopes of a dying soldier or the longings of a war-torn and suffering world...



Where I came from there were no hills at all
The land was flat, the highway straight and wide
My brother and I would drive for hours
Like we had years instead of days
Our faces as pale as the dirty snow

Once I knew there was a love divine
Then came a time I thought it knew me not
Who can forgive forgiveness where forgiveness is not
Only the lamb as white as snow

And the water, it was icy
As it washed over me
And the moon shone above me

Now this dry ground, it bears no fruit at all
Only poppies laugh under the crescent moon
The road refuses strangers
The land, the seeds we sow
Where might we find the lamb as white as snow

As boys we would go hunting in the woods
To sleep the night shooting out the stars
Now the wolves are every passing stranger
Every face we cannot know
If only a heart could be as white as snow
If only a heart could be as white as snow

~~~~

For more on this, see my post last year on the O Antiphons here

Advent

Here is the gospel reading for Advent Sunday from Matthew 24:36-44, as a seasonally coloured Wordle...

‘...But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son,^* but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day^* your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour...'^{3738394041424344}

It is interesting to note that the Wordle highlights the words son, man, one and coming. The Son of Man is one who is coming.

Who or what is the Son of Man? It seems that the phrase over the centuries has meant different things. In the very earliest times it referred most probably to a human being or one's self. For example in the Old Testament in Numbers 23:19

לא אישׁ אל ויכזב ובן־אדם ויתנחם ההוא אמר ולא יעשׂה ודבר ולא יקימנה

God is not a human being (איש : ['iysh]), that he should lie,

or a mortal/son of man (בן–אדם : [ben-'adam]), that he should change his mind:

Has he promised, and will he not do it?

Has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?

Ben-adam. The son of Adam. The son of a man.

Later in the Book of Ezekiel in chapter 2:

He said to me, Son of man (בן־אדם : [ben-'adam]), stand on your feet, and I will speak with you. ² The Spirit entered into me when he spoke to me, and set me on my feet; and I heard him who spoke to me. ³ He said to me, Son of man (בן־אדם : [ben-'adam]), I send you to the children of Israel, to nations that are rebellious, which have rebelled against me: they and their fathers have transgressed against me even to this very day. ⁴ The children are impudent and stiff-hearted: I do send you to them; and you shall tell them, Thus says the Lord YHWH. ⁵ They, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear, (for they are a rebellious house,) yet shall know that there has been a prophet among them. ⁶ You, son of man (בן־אדם : [ben-'adam]), don’t be afraid of them, neither be afraid of their words, though briers and thorns are with you, and you do dwell among scorpions: don’t be afraid of their words, nor be dismayed at their looks, though they are a rebellious house. ⁷ You shall speak my words to them, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear; for they are most rebellious. ⁸ But you, son of man (בן־אדם : [ben-'adam]), hear what I tell you; don’t be you rebellious like that rebellious house: open your mouth, and eat that which I give you. ⁹ When I looked, behold, a hand was put forth to me; and, behold, a scroll of a book was therein; ¹⁰ He spread it before me: and it was written within and without; and there were written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe.

Son of man here appears to be a title referring to the humanity of the author, much how the word "human" may suffice in English. It is not a respectful appellation, but a humbling one (in some cases, an arguably abject one), and this use is a consistent pattern throughout Ezekiel.

In other words, the son of man, is a downtrodden figure that the prophet Daniel then links with a divine figure, the coming Messiah, a theological link that was strengthened during the time before New Testament.

In the New Testament, Jesus uses the term in similar ways, but some think he might just be referring to humanity generally.

How do we deal with this this Advent? The Son of Man is coming - that's what Advent is about. Getting ready for the arrival of the Messiah figure - God's chosen leader who would forge a new relationship between humanity and God and free humanity from the oppressive regime that they were bound by. Then it was a longing for a Divine King freeing people from the rule of the Romans. Today it might be a longing to be freed from debt, from habit forming behaviours and led to a better way of living. Or if the Son of Man refers to the whole of humanity, then a longing that a better 'version' of humanity is coming, is made possible by God. Either way it is a hopeful vision indeed... God's take on things, is that He longs to free us and enable us to be the people that He and we (however deep down we may need to look) long to be...

When I posted this on Rectory Musings last week I had two helpful comments wheich I share with you here...

Ramtopsrac said:

Two questions:

surely it is (if you take the original meaning) the "new humanity" that is coming, not just a longing for it? Aren't we moving towards fulfilment in either meaning?

God wants us to be free to be the people we long to be... is I think what you say. But shouldn't we be hoping/longing to be the people that God made us to be, rather than letting our own desires dominate? Or am I reading you wrong.

James Ogley said:

'adam of course is not gender specific (see http://jamesthevicar.com/wordpress/2008/07/29/adam-male/) so ben-adam could be rendered "Son of humanity" or "born of human" or something along those lines. This brings to life the state of the whole of humanity and so the enormity of what is wrought by the "new adam" - the new human.

The Wating is almost over...

Advent Sunday is almost upon us. To help us get the most out of this holy season of preparation, I'd like to suggest tome resources below that might help you.


Firstly there is the St Albans Diocese Advent Challenge: Me, You, the World and God. You will receive a daily bible verse by email or text. The verses, which begin in Genesis and go through to the Nativity, offer an opportunity to reflect on our relationship with one another, with the world and with God. The themes of the weeks are Beginnings, Relationships, Visions and Encounters.

You can also download a leaflet for each week listing the verses. The leaflet, like the email, offers brief comments, questions for reflection and pointers for prayer. Sign up here. Tell your friends.

Secondly there is there is the Church of England's own initiative called 'Ready, Steady, Slow' which begins on December 1st. Daily reflections and an accompanying book can be accessed here.






Thirdly you might wish to take part in another online activity - a retelling of the Nativity. The Natwivity (the Twitter Nativity) takes advantage of social media’s unparalleled capacity to engage people as they go about their everyday life to re-tell the Christmas story in a fresh, personal way. Available on Twitter and Facebook, people will be able to pick up the ‘tweets’ online in their homes, in the high street using their phones and at work.

The Natwivity will give this famous story an immediate, real-life feel, transforming them from people 2,000 years ago to friends of the user, who are going through the drama now. Followers will be able to read Mary’s angst as she tries to come to terms with the birth of her child, and hear from the stunned shepherds after their encounter with an angel.

Each 140-character entry will be a thought or comment from Mary, Joseph, collective wisemen and shepherds, with further entries from Herod, an Inn Keeper (and his wife) and friends of Mary and Joseph.

Through this project we aim to…

• Reinforce the story of Christmas
• Allow the 21st century audience to engage with the story in a new way
• Create a space for Christians during a cluttered time of the year to remember the story
• Create a way for Christians to engage their friends with the story in a thought-provoking, yet fun way