Destination Bethlehem. J. Barrie Shepherd
it you are looking for? Are you looking for a home, a place you used to know and cherish, but which only now exists as a coziness and warmth, a belonging, back at the furthest reaches of the memory? Are you looking for a home?
Are you looking for prosperity? Not, perhaps, ten million dollars, but sufficient financial resources so you can break away from the monthly scraping and hoping over the checking account, afford the occasional something that is shiny, soft, and absolutely foolish, for yourself, and for those you love?
Are you looking for recognition, yearning for people to know you, who you are and how you are? (A bore has been defined as someone who, when you ask him how he is, tells you.) Are you looking for recognition?
Are you looking for adventure, something, anything, to break up the murderous monotonies of daily bread and then to bed, five, six, seven days a week? Are you looking for adventure?
Could it be health you are after, a confidence in your own well-being, so that you can make it over the hurdles, through the lurking pitfalls of life and, if not defeat that last enemy, at least die fulfilled at a ripe old age?
Are you looking for peace, peace in the world of course, but more than that, peace within? Do you seek peace with your own self, so that you can forgive yourself, accept yourself, even begin actually to be yourself, instead of the person you think others expect you to be?
Are you looking for love, that giving which is also, and uniquely a receiving, a receiving of another self, a beloved self, and then the receiving of your own self back again, refreshed, restored, renewed by the tenderness and concern, the laughter and hope, the fresh vision of yourself caught in someone else’s eyes and dreams? Are you looking, still looking, for love?
Then come with me to Bethlehem. Come, all who are seeking for any of the above to where we will find, if not the end of our searching, at least a new and true beginning, a key with which to open doors, a clue by which to solve life’s mysteries, a child in whose humble, innocent, and lovely birth we can find ourselves reborn. Come, take the road to Bethlehem this December morning, set out again upon this age-old, brand-new journey, and let us look for something, look for Christmas together throughout this Advent season.
President Howard Lowry of The College of Wooster used to describe in his freshman classes a boyhood camping trip into the deep caves of Kentucky. Far, far back, at last, among the stalactites and stalagmites, crawling along a narrow ledge with a guide and a few bold friends, they turned a corner and came upon a wall covered with initials and names of other campers, other intrepid explorers who had preceded them in years past. And there, by the dim, smoky light of a lantern, he discovered with a thrill his own father’s name, carved years before on a similar expedition.
The Christian church in our time—an era shadowed by terror, crime, corruption, and despair—today’s community of believers can be seen like that daring group, a search party, explorers risking the deeper, often darker facets of life to look for something. We have provisions for the journey, simple bread and royal wine to sustain the soul. We have our guide in him whose name we bear as Christians, whose wounded feet have marked the way ahead. We have our lantern shining-bright within the pages of our ancient, holy book. So let us pray that, as we search together, we too may turn that final corner, may reach out and trace our Father’s name; and thus know the search is ended, the lost is found, and we are home, and we are welcomed within our Father’s house, forever and forever.
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You are the Way, Lord Christ. Lead us, in our quest, to ourselves and then beyond. You are the Truth, Lord Christ. Teach us to know you, and thus to know ourselves in you. You are the Life, Lord Christ. So bring your Life to birth in us this Advent, until we come to kneel and to adore, to give ourselves, and lose ourselves, and find ourselves in you. Amen.
Anticipation?
Looking forward comes more readily
to folk whose here and now is not so God-Almighty
crammed with all this getting and maintaining.
Even these Advent calendars and candles
can soon become another detour,
distracting from the blessed emptiness
that filled the Virgin’s Womb.
Is there a sacral stripping
can purge, prepare, accommodate,
make spare and elemental room for whatever
holy mystery there is to come?
Or will this omnipresent fatness
swallow up, consume, devour all keen anticipation,
transform our expectation into old, habitual doom.
Seasonings
The gentle, sure, progression
of four candled Sabbaths toward the stable,
those forty, purple-proving days to find a way
from winter into spring, scarlet-flamed Pentecost,
white, and shining-bright Epiphany,
such feastings, fasts, and festivals—
this numbering and naming of the days and weeks—
played little or no part within the Calvinistic calendar
of my Scottish boyhood, kirk-encapsulated years.
“All Catholic mumbo-jumbo . . . hocus-pocus,”
was the general, grim, self-satisfied consensus.
Just show me, if you can,
where you will find this in the Bible.
Even so does eager zeal,
and dry, unliberated intellect,
strip life away from life,
drastically diminish holy wonder,
and, in the austere name of barren truth,
leave days and seasons, faith itself, impoverished.
Early Advent
This purple takes a bit of getting used to,
ditto candles, wreaths and greens,
plus greeting cards arriving in the mail.
Surely it’s not that time again already . . .
time to get ready, as so many times before,
prepared to greet the coming of that One who,
despite all our days and years of solemn expectation,
never fails to surprise,
to advent in the most unsuitable of venues,
dazzle with tears of memory, loss, regret,
the mad-yet-mending impulses of tenderness,
faint, yet still fair, fragrances of future hope,
then leave behind a lingering glimpse
of warm, mid-winter welcomes yet to be.
Advent Premonition
And so it all begins again,
the candles and the purple cloths,
the holly and the ivy, the tree to be set up,
cards to sign and seal, to stamp and mail,
those certain, blessed songs to sing, and the uncertain too.
We call it “getting ready,” as if we were ever ready
for whatever it is that’s ripening up ahead.
Fact is, it will surprise us, shock us,
knock our socks