What are we waiting for

1.   Meditation

https://youtu.be/uxjh2V1zsrA?si=meA2ZqqRwPLjjaxl

2.  Song

https://youtu.be/gXbS-SDHiTs?si=sjjYUqdo-8GUKGEH

3.  NARRATIVE

Fourth Sunday of Advent

Father Richard Rohr describes how Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) shaped Christianity’s celebration of Christmas.

In the first 1200 years of Christianity, the most prominent feast was Easter, the celebration of Christ’s resurrection. Around 1200, Francis of Assisi entered the scene, and he felt we didn’t need to wait for God to love us through the cross and resurrection. He believed God loved us from the very beginning and showed this love by becoming incarnate in Jesus. He popularized what we take for granted today, the great Christian feast of Christmas. But Christmas only started being popular in the 13th century.

The main point I want to make is the switch in theological emphasis that took place. The Franciscans realized that if God had become flesh and taken on materiality, physicality, and humanity, then the problem of our unworthiness was solved from the very beginning! God “saved” us by becoming one of us!

Franciscans fasted a lot in those days, as many Christians did, and Francis went so wild over Christmas that he said, “On Christmas Day, I want even the walls to eat meat!” [1] He said that every tree should be decorated with lights to show that that is its true nature. That’s what Christians around the world still do eight hundred years later.

But remember, when we speak of Advent or waiting and preparing for Christmas, we’re not simply waiting for the little baby Jesus to be born. That already happened two thousand years ago. We’re forever welcoming the Universal Christ, the Cosmic Christ, the Christ that is forever being born in the human soul and into history.

Franciscan sister and theologian Ilia Delio invites us to consider Advent as a time to wake up to God’s incarnate presence:

The word Advent comes from the Latin adventus meaning arrival, “coming.” . . .

[But] if God has already come to us, what are we waiting for? If God has already become incarnate in Jesus what are we waiting for? And I think that’s a really interesting question. . . .

We’re called to awaken to what’s already in our midst. . . . I think Advent is a coming to a new consciousness of God, you know, already loving us into something new, into something more whole, that we’re not in a sense waiting for what’s not there; we’re in a sense to be attending to what’s already there.

But the other part I think is that we can think of Advent as God waiting for us to wake up! You know, as if we’re asleep in the manger, not Jesus! Jesus is alive in our midst. . . . What if we’re in the manger and God is already awakened in our midst and we’re so fallen asleep, we’re so unconsciously asleep that God is sort of looking for “someone [to] get up and help bring the gifts into the world?” . . .

Let’s awaken to what God is doing in us and what God is seeking to become in us.

References:
[1] Thomas of Celano, The Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul, chapter 151. See Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 2, The Founder, ed. Regis J. Armstong, J. Wayne Hellman, William J. Short (New City Press: 2000), 374.

Adapted from An Advent Reflection with Father Richard Rohr (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2017) video. https://vimeo.com/246331333

Ilia Delio, “Moving Onwards Forward: An Advent Message from Ilia Delio,” New Creation, November 15, 2018 (Center for Christogenesis: 2018), video.

4.  Prayer 

God of hope, who brought love into this world,
be the love that dwells between us.
God of hope, who brought peace into this world,
be the peace that dwells between us.
God of hope, who brought joy into this world,
be the joy that dwells between us.
God of hope, the rock we stand upon,
be the centre, the focus of our lives
always, and particularly this Advent time.

5.  Meditation

https://youtu.be/OoPuG9Dx8UQ?si=pla0BI4n6B_dF5xp

6.  Song

https://youtu.be/m1LAh--a8e4?si=KorAHr3I6IairCs1

https://youtu.be/p98pggeJRKo?si=tru8a6LEvDKJAlK9

Paula’s Prayer Meeting 12/13/2023

 ttps://youtu.be/SM8rLnfY0mM?si=jJ0Ez7fJ3XbqwYzP

  

 

Beyond the moon and stars, as deep as night,
So great our hunger, Lord, to see your light.
The sparrow finds her home beneath your wing,
So may we come to rest where angels sing.

Our eyes have longed to see your loving face,
To live within your courts for all our days.

Your roads have led us, Lord, 'cross desert sand.
We place our hopes and dreams within your hand.

Upon our darkness, Lord, a light has shone.
You came to dwell with us in flesh and bone.

With shining stars at night, and cloud by day,
you brought us here to see your love's display.

When life’s great journey ends, and day is done,
Then may our eyes behold your Holy One.
​​​​​​(Dan Shutte)

 

“The season of Advent means there is something on the horizon the likes of which we have never seen before.  It is not possible to keep it from coming, because it will.  That’s just how Advent works.  What is possible is to not see it, to miss it, to turn just as it brushes past you.  And you begin to grasp what it was you missed, like Moses in the cleft of the rock, watching God’s hindquarters fade in the distance.  So, Stay. Sit. Linger. Tarry. Ponder. Wait.  Behold.  Wonder.  There will be time enough For running.  For rushing.  For worrying.  For pushing.  For now, stay.  Wait.  Something is on the horizon.”​​​​​​​​​From Night Vision – Jan Richardson

Slow Cooker Sloppy Joe

 

Slow Cooker Sloppy Joe

2 lbs. lean ground beef (95% lean)

1 onion, chopped

1 potato peeled and diced

1/4 cup catsup

1 small can tomato sauce

squirt of hot sauce

1 tbsp soy sauce

1/2 bag frozen peas and carrots

Place all the ingredients in the slow cooker.  Cook at low setting for 8 hours or at high for 4 hours.  I cooked mine in an Aroma brand multi-cooker at slow cooker setting for 2 hours.

Note:

Since the beef was lean there was no need to worry of excess oil oozing out.  There was no need to add water either.  

Awe, wonder and love

 

1.  meditation

https://youtu.be/VifGjYnI5L8?si=a3zCgxKglB_yje7J

2.  song

https://youtu.be/Kzq8V7Iil3I?si=owpC1_lhnQ5qqxXC

3.  Narrative

Awe, Wonder, and Love
Thursday, August 13, 2020

A sense of wonder and awe is the foundation of religion. Too often we associate religion with belonging to a church or professing certain beliefs, but the religious instinct is so much broader than that. Sikh activist and human rights lawyer Valarie Kaur teaches us that awe and wonder can make us available to greater depths of compassion, union, and love. 

Wonder is our birthright. It comes easily in childhood—the feeling of watching dust motes dancing in sunlight, or climbing a tree to touch the sky, or falling asleep thinking about where the universe ends. If we are safe and nurtured enough to develop our capacity to wonder, we start to wonder about the people in our lives, too—their thoughts and experiences, their pain and joy, their wants and needs. We begin to sense that they are to themselves as vast and complex as we are to ourselves, their inner world as infinite as our own. In other words, we are seeing them as our equal. We are gaining information about how to love them. Wonder is the wellspring for love. . . .

The call to love beyond our own flesh and blood is ancient. It echoes down to us on the lips of indigenous leaders, spiritual teachers, and social reformers through the centuries. [The founder of Sikhism] Guru Nanak called us to see no stranger, Buddha to practice unending compassion, Abraham to open our tent to all, Jesus to love our neighbors, Muhammad to take in the orphan, [Hindu mystic saint] Mirabai to love without limit. They all expanded the circle of who counts as one of us, and therefore who is worthy of our care and concern. These teachings were rooted in the linguistic, cultural, and spiritual contexts of their time, but they spoke of a common vision of our interconnectedness and interdependence. . . .

What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science: We are all indivisibly part of one another. We share a common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth. The air we breathe contains atoms that have passed through the lungs of ancestors long dead. Our bodies are composed of the same elements created deep inside the furnaces of long-dead stars. We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say—as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact: You are a part of me I do not yet know. 

But you don’t have to be religious in order to open to wonder. You only have to reclaim a sliver of what you once knew as a child. If you remember how to wonder, then you already have what you need to learn how to love.

Reference:
Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love (One World: 2020), 10–11.

4.  Prayers

God of wonders,

you show us your beauty in all created things.

Help us to pay attention:

to the taste of the ocean on our lips,

the warmth of the sun on our hands,

the song of birds in the morning and evening, the fragrance of the earth after rain,

and to the star that guides us.

Creator God,

we stand in awe of all that you have made.

Fill our hearts with gratitude

for every good gift, great and small, that feeds and forms us,

inviting and enabling us

to become people who are fully alive in your amazing grace.

AMEN.

5.  Meditation

https://youtu.be/LHPRaz5TlQ4?si=r3J00AXvOr0SbV_0

6. Song 

https://youtu.be/BmZTz5H49zw?si=lBQLh9ZyeVLciUwP