Category Archives: Advent

Words of Witness – Advent Week 3: JOY

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We gather here today in God’s Spirit of joy

that erases all memory of pain and fear

like the holy cry of a newborn child.

 

Despite the status quo and daily grind that stifle our humanity

Despite unanswered prayers that make us doubt divinity

In the face of desperation and discrimination, sickness and loss,

In the face of death itself, we come.

 

We come because of all these things,

believing that God’s joy is as unconditional as God’s love,

as unbounded and independent of circumstances as God’s own Spirit.

Holy Spirit, help our unbelief.

 

We gather in the joy of the Spirit who groans for us,

longing that our joy be made full,

that our joy be made deeper

than the pride we can buoy only with compliments,

more grounded than the mania we conjure against depression.

The joy of letting our guard down.

The joy of going beyond our limitations and our successes.

Giving more, doing more than we thought possible

only to find we have and are more than when we began.

Joy in the journey when the end is not yet in sight.

Walking freely in the counsel of the wise.

Being blessed by our children.

Joy transcending time and place

to make joy possible in our time and place.

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“The Way of Water” – photograph by Jenn Cavanaugh

We are God’s people.

We light this candle as a sign of God’s joy

who comes to us in the newness of life

and makes a home among us, and for us.

O come, Immanuel.

 

 

Composed by and for the American Church in Paris community, the work of the people to the glory of God.

Words of Witness – Advent Week 2: PEACE

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We gather here today in response to Christ’s peace

that draws our eyes upward

like birdsong and rainbow against a storm-dark sky,

promising an end to destruction.

 
Despite the interminable warzones we shrug must always be so;

Despite the seething culture wars boiling over into our own streets;

Despite our clenched fists, anxious minds, and overburdened hearts;

Despite our frustrated relationships and hard-wired wariness, we come.

banksylovevspeace

by Banksy

 
We come because of all these things,

believing that our inner chaos can be rightly ordered,

that wrongs will be righted, that wars and fears shall cease,

that a day will come when we will no longer live by the sword or die by the gun.

Jesus help our unbelief.

 
We gather in the name of the savior who is our peace,

a peace beyond fleeting distraction,

beyond the suppression of hostility.

A more perfect peace we glimpse

from the zone we enter when we run, when we bike,

when we read, when we create.

Peace resonating after the choir’s last chord.

Peace with God and with ourselves.

Well-placed trust in friends and harmony with enemies,

smiles from strangers and the company of those who love us.

All the world’s children tucked safely into beds,

Falling snow framed in a picture window,

and the time to watch it fall,

mug in hand, good things baking in the oven.

The smell of a forest in its prime, clearing the air,

The trickle of snowmelt, reviving the earth.

Peace running like a warm bath at the end of a hard day,

when all has been done and done well.

 
We are God’s people.

We light this candle as a sign of God’s peace

who comes to us in the fullness of time

and makes a home among us.

O come, Immanuel.

Words of Witness – Advent week 1: HOPE

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We gather here today in response to God’s hope

that calls us like church bells,

heralding the birth of a savior

and new life offered to all.

selective focus photography of paintbrush near paint pallet

Photo by Steve Johnson on Pexels.com

Despite the failure of our systems to protect the innocent.

Despite the arrogance of those who say there is no hope.

Despite our distorted desires

and disheartening battles, we come.

 

We come because of all these things,

believing that things could be different,

that things could be better;

that we could be changed.

God help our unbelief.

 

We gather in hope

and in need of God’s perfect hope.

A hope like unbounded light

at the end of our tunneled vision.

A hope like cool waves on sunburnt skin.

A hope that smells like fresh-baked bread,

sustaining our bodies.

A hope that tastes like fresh spring water,

restoring our souls.

A hope like the mess of a palette

resolving itself on canvas

into wonder.

 

We are God’s people.

We light this candle

as a sign of our hope in the God who comes to us in our darkest hour

and makes a home among us.

O come, Immanuel.

 

Composed by and for the American Church in Paris community, the work of the people to the glory of God.

Christmas Again

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“the Word became flesh and lived among us” – John 1:14 (NRSV)

 

“Winter landscape, with rocks” by Sylvia Plath

 

Water in the millrace, through a sluice of stone,

plunges headlong into that black pond

where, absurd and out-of-season, a single swan

floats chaste as snow, taunting the clouded mind

which hungers to haul the white reflection down.

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“Soleil couchant sur la Seine à Lavacourt, effet d’hiver” by Claude Monet

 

The austere sun descends above the fen,

an orange cyclops-eye, scorning to look

longer on this landscape of chagrin;

feathered dark in thought, I stalk like a rook,

brooding as the winter night comes on.

 

Last summer’s reeds are all engraved in ice

as is your image in my eye; dry frost

glazes the window of my hurt; what solace

can be struck from rock to make heart’s waste

grow green again? Who’d walk in this bleak place?

Advent Again – Christmas Eve

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Those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death,
Upon them a light has shined. – Isaiah 9:2b (NKJV)

starry-night-munch

“Stjernenatt” (Starry Night) by Edvard Munch

“Walkative, Talkative” by Alfred Starr Hamilton

When those are the walkative stars
That talked to the immediate prisoners themselves
When those are the talkative stars
That walked along the narrow sledge pathways
Yet those are lines to another star
That were to have been led for changelings
Around a dark dreambox of another kind
That houses our more talkative stars

Advent Again – day 27

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The Promise of the Spirit

 

from “Mountain Building” by Victor Hernández Cruz

 

The Moros live on the top floor eating

Roots and have a rooster on the roof

Africans import okra from the bodega

The Indians make a base of guava

On the first floor

The building is spinning itself into

a spiral of salsa

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“Windows and Lights” by Debra Hurd

Heaven must be calling or the

Residents know the direction

Because there is an upward pull

If you rise too quickly from your seat

You might have to comb a spirit’s

Hair

They float over the chimneys

Arrive through the smog

Appear through the plaster of Paris

It is the same people in the windowed

Mountains.

Advent Again – day 26

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“Your mind will muse on terror… your eyes will see a quiet habitation”

“Woman Holding a Balance” by Johannes Vermeer

from “Hermeneutics” by Kerri Webster

 

All winter she’s been growing more powerful.

Radiant, says the man at the bar.

Voluptuous, says the docent.

Nervy, says God.

All winter her soul has been juddering.

It feels like drinking gold flakes!

The word sleeps inside the stone.

The wind tongues the underside of the lake.

Inside the rifle scope of time, God

teaches her Grounding Techniques

through his emissary, a Certified Therapist.

Beetles bore their dirty traffic into pine trees.

God says, You cling to deixis

like a life raft. Here, you

say. Now, you say. All winter, you say, like it means

something, days crossed off your compulsive

calendar, wind tied to your wrist like

a pet. This dumb hunger for

fixity! I made your cells

to shed, says God. See them

everywhere, everywhere.

…

Advent Again – day 25

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Hannah and the Josephs, generations of prophets and dreamers

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“Hide-and-Seek” by Pavel Tchelitchew

Seeker 

           1    2  red-black  3  burnings  4  of a   5    6  sunset at  7  solstice  8    9   

10  they’ve changed  11  shadows  12  pour down  13    14  my brain  15  I’ll be 

16  surprising strangers  17    18  flailing blind  19    20    21  forever  22  they’ve

left  23  the planet  24  with me here  25  26  tentacled Martians  27  replaced

them  28    29  and they’re  30  creeping behind me  31    32  but I  33  won’t

open my eyes  34    35  say the  36  only thing real  37    38  is the cheek-

roughness  39  of this  40  tree I can’t name  41  but  42  I will someday  43   

44  and hold  45  tight  46  tightly till  47    48    49  then  50 

readier not here I

— Jenn Cavanaugh

originally published in Mars Hill Review (2003)

Advent Again – day 24

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Let none enslave you again…

the-birth-of-christ-paul-gauguin

“The Birth of Christ” by Paul Gauguin

from “The Negro Mother” by Langston Hughes

…

Look at my face — dark as the night —
Yet shining like the sun with love’s true light.

I am the dark girl who crossed the red sea
Carrying in my body the seed of the free.

I am the woman who worked in the field
Bringing the cotton and the corn to yield.

I am the one who labored as a slave,
Beaten and mistreated for the work that I gave —
Children sold away from me, I’m husband sold, too.

No safety , no love, no respect was I due.

Three hundred years in the deepest South:
But God put a song and a prayer in my mouth .

God put a dream like steel in my soul.

Now, through my children, I’m reaching the goal.

…

 

 

Advent Again – day 23

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“again in the pains of childbirth”

 

a-woman-called-mother

“A Woman Called Mother” by M.T. Brown (personal collection)

“From ‘The Black Maria'” by Aracelis Girmay

 

The body, bearing something ordinary as light                           Opens

as in a room somewhere the friend opens in poppy, in flame, burns & bears the child — out.

 

When I did it was the hours & hours of breaking. The bucking of

it all, the push & head

 

not moving, not an inch until,

when he flew from me, it was the night who came

 

flying through me with all its hair,

 

the immense terror of his face & noise.

 

I heard the stranger & my brain, without looking, vowed

a love-him vow. His struggling, merely, to be

 

split me down, with the axe, to two. How true,

the thinness of our hovering between the realms of Here, Not Here.

 

The fight, first, to open, then to breathe,

& then to close. Each of us entering the world

 

& entering the world like this.

Soft. Unlikely.      Then —

 

the idiosyncratic minds & verbs.

Beloveds, making your ways

 

to & away from us, always, across the centuries,

inside the vastness of the galaxy, how improbable it is that this
iteration

 

of you or you or me might come to be at all — Body of fear,

Body of laughing —& even last a second. This fact should make us fall all

 

to our knees with awe,

the beauty of it against these odds,

 

the stacks & stacks of near misses

& slimmest chances that birthed one ancestor into the next & next.

 

Profound, unspeakable cruelty who counters this, who does not see.

& so to tenderness I add my action.

 

Source: Poetry (April 2016)

 

From <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/88747>