So I wish I had the time to write something up that would be more profound than usual. The problem is, there isn't really any time! We are falling farther and farther behind on things as we lurch toward Christmas. All we can do is hang on. There is good news, though, though the days get darker we know that we will ultimately make it out to the other side. With that in mind--and with about 20 things to do before I can have my coffee--I am linking to an article from last year. I was saving it for later, when we are closer to the solstice but it seems that the flow of energy has put it here. The post is about a couple solstice walks. If you are just here for the holiday stuff you might not realize it...but this has mostly been a hiking blog. One of these walks was on the actual night of the solstice. Every year we gather at the trail head to Pegan Hill. Then we walk up as dark falls and sing carols at the top. It is a nice trip! In many ways I like it better than the pomp of Christmas Eve a few days later. The other is a hike I took in the cold the next day. We will be doing the carol sing again this year on the 21st. We will meet at 4:15 pm and the rest is as tradition dictates. Anyway, here is the link to the blog post. I urge you to check it out. Now I am off to the next thing! I am also looking forward to a few moments of peace at least on the solstice if not sooner... ...and here is the video from the top of Crow Hill Ledges last year on the day the sun started its journey back.
0 Comments
We have been trying out a new format at church. I have mentioned it before, actually. We are calling it our "Second Sunday" series--it is always the second Sunday of the month--and it doesn't really have a sermon. I do talk for four minutes or so about the theme. Otherwise there are readings and music. The first service was a bit of a mess as we figured things out. The second was all readings from The Hobbit that address a theme of surprise journeys. Yesterday, on the Second Sunday of Advent, we read from a variety of texts that attempt to make sense of the season in more "modern" terms. While I was putting it together I asked myself what sorts of things have influenced how we celebrate today... Now, Christmas itself is the way some traditions--and not even all Christian ones--have historically made sense of an even more ancient winter observance that lies beneath all the modern holidays. Maybe this is hard to grasp for some people but, of course, it is true. I think that sometimes we have trouble comprehending just how ancient this solstice holiday really is. It is so old, in fact, that we can't really remember its origins. That distance is hard to grasp. This is why we keep reinterpreting it. Sticking just with Christmas, we see an effort over the years to wrap something very old in a relatively new holiday cloth. Jesus probably wasn't born on the 25th of December. We humans just needed him to be so that we had a reason to celebrate. The real show resides in the short days and the cold, inclement weather. If anyone needs any evidence of the pagan roots of Christmas they don't need to look any further than one of the carols we sang at yesterday's service. The Sans Day Carol is a Cornish folk song and a tribute to the holly plant. The song calls it the “first tree in the greenwood." Yes, the lyrics find ways to include Christmas imagery but..one couldn't help but feel a bit like a druid singing it. Humanity has always ascribed magical properties to holly. In one of the books we read from--Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper--the heroes put it over the door to keep the evil spirits out. That is a modern book. However, in this case and in others, the author is alluding to ancient tradition. We can't escape the old holiday. All we can do is change its name and add new traditions that help us to understand. This is the season of the apparent death of the Earth. No matter how we perceive winter--as a recreational bonanza, a dangerous annoyance, or somewhere in between--we need to understand how it would have looked before we could take a picture from outer space. We need to consider a time when people couldn't be quite sure that the spring--and with it life itself--would return. This is why we find those images of holly, ivy, and the long-lasting evergreens in the first place. They are proof that there is still life and abundance under the ice and snow. Now it is easier to know that the season of famine is temporary. However, we have our own fears, don't we? We hope that maybe someday these fears will also seem quaint and unfounded. Until then we also--like the ancients--need that reassurance that comes from gathering together in the old ways. We need the holly and the ivy. We need to pray and sing. The mystery of life, the cycles of the seasons, and the motions of the heavens all reside deep inside us. So we create art--including worship--to explain the profound feeling we have as the world dies before being reborn once again Here is a video of the band yesterday leading that carol... Well the road to church was quite eventful. As you may have gathered from yesterday's installment, things didn't go as planned. We were hoping to catch up on our Christmas stuff. We haven't decorated much at all. Christmas shopping has been put on hold. So Saturday--the last day in the first week of Advent--was going to be the day. Instead we rushed about to get ready and...well...we ended up in the emergency room.
Don't worry about that part. Honestly everyone will be fine in a couple days. Still, it made for a late night getting ready to worship today, which was followed by a long day of errands just getting ready for the week ahead. At least we discussed where we would like to have a Christmas tree. Today we lit the peace candle on the Advent wreath, which reminded me of last week's prayer. I have been thinking about peace a great deal lately. There seems to be so little of it. There is so much going on in the world and there is a great deal going on in our hearts as well. Last week's pastoral prayer addressed many of the same issues even though it was supposed to be about hope. Here is the "prayer" from today though I guess it is more of a poem when I look at it... Advent Peace Adam Tierney-Eliot It feels strange to pray for peace in a time of growing war. Our souls yearn for Something better, more holy, more powerful than the drama of human conflict and yet…here we are; In a world filled with prayers that we do not heed. But we persist in our dream. The dream is better than reality and somewhere in our hearts we still believe that it is possible, possible to build that commonwealth of heaven where justice will roll down and wars will cease So we light candles, we sing songs About life subsisting in hard places. We bring the green of life into the dark of winter. We tell stories of peace and justice and we even act on those stories. So may we keep on dreaming though the world may try to stop us and force us into despair. Hope exists as it always has in acts of love when love is not expected an attitude of faith when despair is desired And always hope for the next day And the next step That will bring us closer to grace There is a sad-assed plastic Christmas tree at the waiting area for the emergency room where people have their baddest of days. It works. The tired styrofoam balls and drooping ribbons converse with the surroundings; the awards show on TV the gray walls, industry-standard chairs and plexiglass shields on everything. There are also people, tired in their own ways. Each carries their private pain on display for others to see if it weren't for their own private pain or the part of it that is an emergent emergency today. It's not a decoration—this sad-assed tree—but a mirror tattered and defiant in the darkest spaces. We face it as our heavy chairs also face it; a lonely spokesman for the desperate cheer of the cold season. --Adam Tierney-Eliot Work and life still go on during this time, obviously. I am sure it is true for you. In my early years I thought it was really great that my job allowed me to participate so deeply in the holidays. These days...it is still pretty cool, honestly. Still, much of the excitement has worn off. Church-Advent is a series of tasks layered on the usual tasks. I have to work my way around that schedule to do the other things like presents, parties, getting the lights on the house, the ornaments out of the attic, and finding a Christmas tree. There is so much to do. My wife and I hope to start tomorrow so we are in some semblance of good cheer by Christmas Eve. As the kids get older, the secular holiday season gets smaller. They aren't around as much. Our youngest is a Senior and a busy with other things as we are. In a couple weeks the two older boys will trundle home for as long as they can before their lives call them elsewhere. Now I understand my grandparents a bit more. They weren't usually all that expressive but they put on a good show when we rolled out of the van on the holidays. Al and I are figuring out that new life-phase as well. There is no one here to remind us of Christmastime in the way they used to. In the end we will figure it all out. It is just different. Anyway, here is a poem... WRITING AN ADVENT SERMON at night in the Worcester Dunkies is clean enough. No one is here but the teenagers behind the counter obsessively mopping. It is away and anywhere but where the noise is too much for seasonal work. Their conversation is about who is into whom and how they are way too savvy elves to fall for someone who wants more than a good time. There is a worldliness here beyond the old man in the corner or the woman who runs her kids to the bathroom and purchases nothing. The teens do not break their concentration on the matter at hand so I put on my headphones watch the headlights and my reflection to write about the bleakness of winter the warmth of donut shops and dreams. --Adam Tierney-Eliot Yesterday I wrote about the "work" of Christmas. Today is more about the job. Wherever you find yourselves right now I hope you are getting something out of it. It is a short season and worth enjoying. First of all...Happy Hanukkah! The Jewish Festival of Lights begins today. Like every other holiday it feels like it is early. However, it is not the worst thing to get on with it right? So if you celebrate this holiday, I hope you have the best one ever. If you don't, maybe it is worth taking the time to learn a thing or two about it. We live in a diverse society. It is important to understand our neighbors. The link above is a very basic introduction that might give you some ideas of where to go next.... Welp...its happened. We have wall-to-wall tasks and meetings until some time in the new year. That is OK. The trick is to leave time for at least some of what we always have done. The great thing about Advent is that people like things pretty much the way they were last year and the year before. Tradition is reassuring, after all. Not only that, it is necessary. Rituals help us to relax our rushing brains in order to think on higher things. These rituals may be formal--like communion--or it can be casual, like watching Miracle on 34th Street. Sometimes--particularly if our kids are young--we talk about starting "new traditions." Of course we don't know if it is really a tradition until a few years in. In that sense, all traditions are old...but some are younger than others. Anyway, as is traditional, I will be posting some old texts from previous years here on the weblog when things get too busy for me to maintain any newness. I know I have been sharing a few old things already. That is because it is fun! Here, though, is a longer essay from back in 2017 during the second week of Advent when things were picking up and there was so much to do. In that way it is just like today! Anyway, it about the tradition of Christmas Eve services and also about the quest for meaning when the secular world doesn't really want us to have one... Practicing with Candles Adam Tierney-Eliot Advent 2017 I need to do tasks today. Some are Advent tasks others are "so we don't starve" tasks. I try to front load this month as time becomes its own precious commodity the closer we get to the "big day". This is true for everyone. However church is one of the places we see this pressure the most. Whether we are members of some sort of congregation or not, we want some religious and spiritual element to the holidays. For those of us who celebrate Christmas, we want to feel it, not just buy it. There aren't a lot of places left where you can do that anymore. Therefore, people bring these desires with them to worship. Some people--just as with Christmas shopping--wait until the very last moment. The first and only time we see them is at Christmas Eve. That is OK. Still, it poses a challenge for the church. Frequently, the ones for whom this is true carry unrealistic expectations about what can be done in 50 minutes on one December night. On the 22nd of December we usually start getting calls from people "shopping" for a Christmas Eve service. They always ask the same question. It isn't theological. It isn't even expressly religious, though in many ways it is profoundly so. What they say when we pick up the phone is "Do you light real candles and sing Silent Night at the end?" The answer of course is "yes." It would be like Springsteen--after three hours of every song he knows--forgetting to play Born to Run. We love the candles. We love how they make us feel. It is a favorite moment of many members in the church. Yet members aren't the ones calling the office. They already know the answer. The ones who call are searching for something in their season that they haven't found yet. Many of them aren't entirely sure what it is. To them church--any church--might be the sort of place that will have it in stock. I don't mean this in a bad way. We love to have visitors in church any old time. It is great to know that people are having feelings right now that may lead them to a deeper spiritual place. In fact we would love to have these callers cease to be visitors and become friends. Besides, why wouldn't you ask about the candles?! It's an important part of our holiday experience. I merely bring this up as an observation of the simple fact that there is something...lacking in the lives of many people. I repeat myself for clarity. There is a lack, not in the people themselves but in the lives they find or feel they must follow. There is a quest for meaning that is with us all year. However--for some folks--it is only in the crazy mixed-up holiday season that they get to recognize it. This is because we often recognize the spiritual dimension of our existence through its absence. On the one hand there is a story of a poor baby born to an unwed mother under trying circumstances. This child and his parents are part of an oppressed minority. Strangers in a strange town, they are repeatedly rejected by people who could help them until, finally, they settle for the corner of a barn. On the other hand we are told to mark this moment by buying sparkly things, toys, and food. We commemorate their suffering by engaging in our conspicuous consumption. Whether you believe the literal truth of the story or not, the contrast is jarring. I am just going to say it. The Christmas Eve service--as lovely as it is--is a strange part of church life. It is where religion slams right up against consumer demand, creating a tangled mass of emotions and desires for people. There are competing constituencies. Partly we are a religious community gathered for a service of religion. Partly we are putting on a show for the secular holiday that dominates the culture. The people who call are sincerely interested in the religious and spiritual dimensions of the last night of Advent. When they ask about the candles they are merely using the language of the season, which isn't religious. It's transactional language. "Do you have the thing I want?" Make no mistake about it. Christmas is mostly secular. One of the two major stories is religious but in that "Jesus vs. Santa Claus" battle, Santa dominates the series. There are plenty of folks who will tell you that it is the "holiest day in the Christian year". If they tell you this, it is a sure sign that they aren't paying attention. As a church holiday, Christmas is in the first rank of the second raters. Easter is number 1. What comes next in the holy-day importance varies by sect and personal preference. However, in the clergy parlor game of holiday ranking, Christmas rarely gets higher than 6. That's OK, though, right? Of course it is! Solstice celebrations pre-date Christianity for a reason. We need a party. It's all good. Yet, it is also important to know what we are looking at. Christmas is a Hallmark event. It's like Valentine's Day. Someone figured out you could boost the economy while singing carols, lighting candles, and putting a tree in your house. This is the challenge; Essentially there are two holidays on December 25. They use many (but not all) of the same symbols. One is spiritual. One is commercial. Each of us has to do the math as to how much of each we will participate in. This is why the holiday I like best right now is Advent and not Christmas at all.. Advent is harder to monetize, so if that is your holiday, you are pretty much left alone. It has an added benefit, too. Since Advent is explicitly religious and minimally co-opted, I can prepare my self for actual Christmas (which begins--but doesn't end--on the 25th). That is, I can stay spiritual on Christmas Eve. I love it. However, I try not to make too many demands on it. Part of the reason that my own tradition didn't really start celebrating holidays--including Advent and Christmas--until the 19th Century was because they believed (and still believe) that every day is equally holy. So, as with other holidays, Advent is a practice for me. It doesn't usher in a more sacred time but helps me to see the sacredness that is always there. Christmas Eve is also a practice, one made more effective because I do not require my spiritual life to come at me in one big dose. Those callers, though. Sometimes they get me down. We do, in fact, have the thing they want. The problem is, people don't get it from a one-off worship service. It comes from years of walking a path of discernment in a community of fellow travelers trying to live their ideals.
Are houses of worship the only places these communities can be found? No. However, at least at Eliot Church, that is what you find. It is what we do every single week. The spiritual or religious experience doesn't come from a holiday. It rises from a practice. Sometimes, however, these phone calls excite me. As I have already said elsewhere this Advent, we are on a journey that starts with a single step. Christmas Eve is an awesome first step to have. We gather together--friends and strangers filled with a vast wealth of experience and stories--to push back the dark and bring our own warmth in the midst of the cold. So yes, of course there will be candles and Silent Night. Please come join us for that sacred and holy hour. Then--if this is the only time you ever visit--maybe after the New Year, when life returns to somewhat more mundane pursuits, you might want to drop back in. We will still be here to help you find what you seek. Today's morning sabbath walk was over at Ridge Hill Reservation. I did a lot of rehab there after my back surgery. We--the dog and I--got there early while it was still cold. I wanted to get her used to sitting in the car to get to a hike. It is a small skill but an important one if you are going to do much hanging out with me. This probably goes for humans as well. Anyway, that was all the "training" I could really get done on our walk. You cannot reason with a puppy who is encountering snow for the first time. Yep, we had a light flurry for about 90 minutes. Nothing stuck but it was exciting both for the dog and for me. It is Advent. Winter is coming. I am looking for it. Hopefully it shows up soon. There is a lot that I hate about winter. The dark gets to me. So does the general inconvenience. However, My animal brain is keyed to its arrival. There is a deep part of me that wants to get on with it. There is another part that worries about how warm our cold-season has become. Yes, I am from Maine, which has different--colder and snowier--habits. Also, old people always think the snow was better when they were young. Yet I do believe that twenty years ago--when we moved to Massachusetts--there was more snow and more cold here than there is now. The pictures of my children--now much older--featured quite a bit of snow. We would go sledding on a hill near here. We would build snow-people. The youth group shoveled out the church regularly. It was normal and lovely. These days around here, it usually shows up in one massive three-day snowstorm in the spring. That strangeness gets to you. It contributes to my eco-anxiety in a big way. There will be more on eco-anxiety later, I am sure. Right now, though, I have to get back to work. so I am leaving you with a few pics of today's largely-invisible suburban snow event, a couple of the old youth group "Snow Crew" in action, and a link to this video of Allison and I hiking during the church winter retreat in Hew Hampshire. That is the sort of thing I am prepping the dog for. We will find winter...even if it no longer comes to us. So, my goal is to post something every weekday on Sabbath Walks as part of a virtual "Advent Calendar" for 2023. I used to try this on Facebook, but now...this is what I will do. There are reasons, of course. I have no illusions about the rate at which my posts are read. However it is good to move through this time with mindfulness. Part of that comes from writing--at least for me--and putting that writing where somebody might find it. Usually it will be snippets of things. Some of them will be new and some will be what I found searching around. That is how life is, too. We don't experience great profundity all the time. If you think you do, well, I doubt your grasp on reality. There are down times built into life. There are fallow periods where we can't quite get our minds wrapped around what is before us. We are humans. We aren't failing when this happens. We are working as designed. With that in mind, I am sharing an old mini-sermon that I gave on Christmas Eve in 2016. I have no real memory of giving it, but it sounds like me. Back then we had two services that night. There was an informal one at 5pm, where the readers were children and many of the musicians were too. Then there was a formal 7pm service, where people would get a little more dressed up and the readings were filled with the "thees and thous" of the Tyndale translation. What follows was probably preached at the 5pm. These days I don't preach on Christmas Eve. I set up all the moving parts and I pray. The night of the 24th--the last moments of Advent--is about the story in the Bible and how it makes us think and feel. It isn't my job to explain. Instead I leave room for each of our hearts to connect to the story, the moment, and the spirit as it may. The Work of Christmas Rev Adam Tierney-Eliot December 24, 2016 So, I was going through an archive of old Christmas sermons in preparation for this evening and I found a script to the pageant we used here at Eliot when I first arrived. Now I realize that some of you probably remember it (and some of you were no doubt in it). For the rest of you, let me just say that it was...different from the way we do it now. After all, back then it began--oddly enough--with this exchange between Mrs. Claus and a reindeer. “Santa” says Mrs, Claus “You need to get busy. There’s so much to do to get ready delivering presents!” Then the Reindeer--mostly innocently--says “Is that what Christmas is all about--delivering presents?” “Not really,” says Mrs. Claus “Santa [she says while turning to her husband] while you are getting up, why don’t you tell us the real story” Now, these days our pageant tends to go straight to the “real” story. However, we still are able to recognize the tension this pageant exchange reflects. We do, after all, understand the young reindeer's confusion. We see and feel the tension ourselves between the call toward the spiritual birth and rebirth that this time has represented (on the one hand) and the excuse for consumption and acquisition--an engine for the economy (on the other hand). It is this second group of activities that dominate much of our surplus time over Advent. I certainly know this to be true. Every year I try and fail to avoid the chaos of the malls and shopping centers of route 9. Every year I try to cut back on my purchases, too. In fact, I more or less succeed at the cutting back. However, I still end up feeling like I should have gotten a couple more things for a few folks on my list. This commercial element of our culture is pervasive. Our understanding of this time is deeply connected to the exchange and display of material goods. So it isn’t all that hard to see how someone like Ebenezer Scrooge could downplay or ignore the religious and ethical obligations of the season. In Dickens' classic Christmas Carol, Scrooge's nephew, Fred, tried his best to set him straight. At one point he describes the holiday as “The only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women...think of people...as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.” Still, it isn’t hard to imagine--given all the noise that can surround the sentiment of the season--how that message can be missed. After all, in the song of Mary she sings that “God has scattered the proud...and brought down rulers..and raised up the humble. Has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away with nothing”. Yet nothing in our observation of the holiday this year seems to indicate any great victory on that front. This Advent it has been difficult to accept the idea that our fellow-passengers do in fact take the message of Christmas to heart. The birth of Jesus, like any birthday can be an excuse for a celebration. However, it feels like the meaning of his life, death, and teachings has fallen on many unheeding ears. Together this Advent we have had our hearts broken by the news from places like Syria. We have journeyed together through a contentious and demoralizing election cycle. We have had our hearts injured again by stories of bigotry and discrimination here in our own towns and in our own neighborhood. So, Mindless cheerfulness is pretty hard to maintain given the current situation. Like the Grinch there are times we wish to escape to the hills, or like Scrooge maybe even to our counting houses. It is enough to make some of us build walls between ourselves and the love we yearn to share and receive. But...here is the thing. Specifically because it is so hard to put on the usual festive veneer, many of us haven’t really tried! Instead we have put our energy elsewhere this December. Sure, maybe our Christmas trees and our lights went up late. Maybe our gift list is still a shambles and there is nothing we can do about it by tomorrow, but we took the time and energy we normally spend on these things and put it somewhere else. That’s right. We put our energy somewhere else. Looking out into the troubled world of 2016 we have chosen to find ways to help. We have found ways to speak out into the darkness. We did this for the sake of others. We did it for our own sakes, too. For example, this church took on the Christmas Open Door community meal this week, which is no mean feat in the midst of everything else. We also went caroling at Riverbend Nursing Home. In addition, many of us have found some healing in the work of Natick Is United. The rainbow “Peace” flag campaign, the marches and vigils, the joint statements and all the rest have drawn our minds away from despair and into action. Then through action we have been drawn back to hope. Hope, is, after all, what this holiday truly is about. It is about Hope for a light in the dark, a light that is kindled by our fellow beings through the exercise of a broad, dynamic faith And an all-encompassing love. This year we are learning to live into the words of the civil rights leader Howard Thurman. The work of Christmas begins he tells us to find the lost to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the brothers and sisters, to make music in the heart Our lives--and hopefully the lives of others--will be better for this work, so tonight we remember. We remember that the birthday we are celebrating is not our own. We remember that we are called to walk the path of faith. We remember we are called to walk the path of justice. I got up early today to take the dog for a walk. She needs at least two solid hours of exercise a day. We can carve out about ninety minutes in the morning of we are careful. Earliest is best. That way we get ahead of the casual dog walkers; the ones to get tired quickly and let their pets off to roam and poop in the woods. With a puppy--or any energetic dog--it is good to be away from the folks who flaunt the leash laws. It is no fun negotiating an encounter with another dog whose owner's only aid is to say things like, "I don't know what has gotten into her..." Anyway, it was raining a bit today, which also kept the numbers down. It is good for the dog to get comfortable with the wet weather. It is also nice to be able to grab some silent moments in this cluster of trees surrounded by suburbia. The second day in Advent, it turns out, started well with a stroll along the Charles. I have written about the Charles River before. In fact, it has its own category. These days we also use the Algonquian name, Quinobequin. By either name it looms large in the literature of the area. The funny thing is that it doesn't really get that big until near the end, when it nears the very end outside Boston. Here in Metrowest it is slow, narrow, and marshy. It is a great place for birds. These days I can hear the geese calling to each other, with their wings pounding and whistling as they are started by a fox or--more likely--someone else's dog on the opposite bank. In any case it is a good way to begin the first Advent workweek of 2023. It still feels like fall and will for a while. Given the state of the environment it may always feel like that now. My family is posting pictures of snow up in Maine but everywhere is warmer and it feels strange. That said, with some effort--and the sacrifice of 30 minutes of sleep--we got some quiet in a chaotic world. The big bang of church is behind us for a time. Now the still small voice. I leave you with this video of our congregation participating in the "Sanctuary Lighting" yesterday morning. Every year we take the readings we will use for Advent, pick six of them to listen for, and then read them together on the first Sunday. Half are biblical and half are not. It was chaotic but we are enjoying ourselves.... And just like that...here we are.... It is Sunday afternoon and I am sitting on the couch, watching a youtube video of a dog sleeping in front of a fire. The dog looks pretty darn content in their massive bed that features a prominent LL Bean logo, so I can only assume it is an advertisement for dog beds, and LL Bean in general. Thanks algorithm! We got a puppy the day before Thanksgiving Sunday (which is the Sunday before Thanksgiving if you are in church) and I have been looking up vids to help her get settled. The dog on the video is some kind of labrador retriever. The puppy is half-lab. Maybe she will take some lying down lessons... Of course it isn't Thanksgiving anymore. Advent started this very day! I have to say that it took me a bit by surprise this year. We had that extra Sunday--November 26--which our church went ahead and cancelled. However, I didn't rest exactly. There was that puppy,...and work...and the usual drama of life that left me almost completely unaware of the looming crisis of December holidays.
What snapped me out of it was an invitation to a party on December 1. This important date is, of course, the beginning of secular Advent. We mark the first of December by opening the first door on our calendars to get our daily chocolate or scotch, or whatever the person who gives us the calendars chose this year. Anyway, a clergy friend held a party on December 1 to kick things off and I had to bring something. This meant that--between dog walks--I was forced to turn on the Christmas music and make my first fruitcake of the season. This bake included the very last of the cranberry compote from Thanksgiving dinner. The loaf I saved and "tested" for the party was pretty OK. I hope people liked the other one. I don't have much to say about the holiday today. However, I wanted to check in. Advent is one of my favorite times of year and I try to give it the respect it deserves by not lurching directly to Christmas. It is ironic, but being a church person means less Christmas, not more. I like it that way. It keeps everything in its time. That said I have some Advent "gifts" for you. Don't get excited! They are all virtual. Also, it includes the "Yule Dog" which I didn't make and don't really endorse in any meaningful sense. So here is the link to my "fruitcake" recipe. I use it every year and give them away as much as possible. Then I stop when I feel like it. That moment usually arrives before Epiphany. Also, below you will find my "Advent prayer" from this morning. It is really kind of a meditation, but whatever. We had our annual sanctuary lighting today--which involves lots of readings and open flame--then we had communion. The meditation here closed communion, which was fine. So the video of the dog by the fire continues. While I was writing this, the bottom half of a person came in with a classy LL Bean log-carrier, stoked the fire, and returned to pet the dog and drop off their snowy boots. The boots, of course, are those super-ugly-and-uncomfortable "Bean Boots" that were the bane of my childhood. I bet the dog is named after the Chesapeake Bay. I remember lots of "Chessies" growing up. This is the sort of set-up they would like. It kinda makes me wish I had a fireplace...and a scratchy wool blanket...and that it was snowing. OMG! The "dog owner" is back wearing LL Bean slippers and stoking the fire with a bespoke fire poker! This is about as much excitement as I can handle on a Sunday afternoon in the rain. Anyway, here is the prayer. I need to walk my dog, who is named after a mountain in New Hampshire, which is totally different from being named after a bay in Maryland... Advent Prayer 2023 Adam Tierney-Eliot It doesn't start with a star It doesn't start with hallelujahs and amens It starts with stumbling through the dark It starts all too frequently with loss oppression and the rocky road to nothing Then we begin with a moment of desperation on our knees With crying out and wondering if if our cries will be heard at all And then it starts with the hands that lift us up brush us off feed us, even, and walk us into the day We may be too tired to notice these hands but they are there Each caring hand the hand of God and the human hands of human hope We shudder to turn these hands to violence We resist using them for selfish ends Advent does not begin with a star or an angel or a hymn but begins with us in communion with humanity Advent begins as stillness In the chaos and then the stillness grows |
Adam Tierney-EliotI am a full-time pastor in a small, progressive church in Massachusetts. This blog is about the non-church things I do to find spiritual sustenance. Archives
March 2024
Categories
All
|