This Industrious Advent

Posted on December 15, 2017 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

It is a quiet hush, this advent, but a hush that is expectant.

It is a silent waiting, this advent, but a waiting that is heavy.

It is the upraised conductor’s baton before the explosive opening salvo.

Don’t let the quiet waiting deceive you. The very idea of the God who spoke light into existence becoming an eyeless embryo swimming in the dark of a womb is astounding.

Don’t let the season itself distract you. The caroling and feasting, the decorating and gifting, it all tries to smother the startling significance of advent.

We must try to “restore that quietness, that inner peace, that willingness to wait unfulfilled in the dark, in the midst of a season that conspires to do nothing but fling bling and tinsel at us right through December.” ~ Malcolm Guite

Find your quiet moments and stay focused.

Advent celebrates a visitation to our world. A visitation that will happen again.

The visitation of our God upon this little planet of ours happened once and will happen again and we are to work to bring it about.

It is not a passive waiting. It is a heavy and expectant waiting. A waiting into which we are welcomed.

That is why, behind all our fun and games at Christmastime, we should not try to escape a sense of awe, almost a sense of fright, at what God has done…Nothing can alter the fact that we live on a visited planet. ~ J. B. Phillips

This advent is a waiting in which we are to pray and work for the spreading of God’s kingdom, for His will to be done here on earth as it is in heaven.

This advent is a waiting in which we are to be awake and alert so that His coming will not be a horror to us but an unending joy.

It is a quiet hush, this advent, but a hush that is focused.

It is a silent waiting, this advent, but a waiting that is industrious.

E’en so, Lord Jesus, quickly come.

All photographs copyright Made Sacred 2017

Living in the Dark

Posted on December 23, 2016 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Christmas begins in the dark.

Advent, this season leading up to Christmas, is for us. It is for we who live in the dark.

This season seems to amplify pain. Those who are lonely feel more lonely, those who are grieving feel their grief more deeply, those who are hurting seem to suffer more.

And that’s okay.

It’s okay not to feel happy this time of year.

After all, Christmas doesn’t mean much if we don’t need it.

Mary understood. Her angel visitation led to a rift between her and her beloved, a painful journey on a donkey, and giving birth next to a chicken.

Even as she clutched her newborn son, she heard the prophecy of a sword piercing her heart and wondered.

Even after her Christmas, her beloved son grew farther and farther away from her, uttering such things as Why would you look for me? Don’t you know I must be about my Father’s business? and, when she came through the crowds to see him, My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.

Yet Mary stayed close. She trusted and held on to her faith in her son no matter how distant he seemed, even when he died. She stayed close. Everywhere we look in the gospels we see Mary, hovering on the outskirts, still showing up, still coming back to her son again and again.

Can we do the same?

Can we hold on to our faith in the Son no matter how distant He seems, even if He seems to be dead?

This world is dark and we live in a continual Advent.

Don’t run away from the bitter-sweetness of this Advent season. You don’t have to pretend to feel joyful.

Don’t hide behind the tinsel and lights. Neither should you ignore the colors completely.

Linger as you abide with the sorrow and the joy, the hurt and the hope that are woven together in this season. Stay close to the Son however far away He may seem.

Settle into the knowing of how desperately we need Christmas, how desperately we need God-with-us.

Our Father promised that Christmas would come

and it will be all the more beautiful for having lived through the darkness of Advent.

Art credit: Pieta by Michelangelo; all other photographs copyrighted by Elizabeth Giger

Longing and Hoping He Will Come

Posted on December 16, 2016 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Advent is a time of waiting. A time of light and of dark, a holy season of expectancy.

Advent means arrival and we are waiting for your arrival, oh Light of the world.

We sing our beautiful songs of longing and of hope and we pray that you will come.

Kings and prophets of old prayed, Come!

All my life, I have prayed, Come!

Yet has humanity gotten any closer to you in these thousands of years of our existence?

Have I gotten any closer to you in my few decades of life?

Or is the distance to you always the same no matter how far we travel?

When our bleeding feet have apparently covered a part of the distance to your eternity, don’t you always retreat twice as far away from us, into the immense reaches filled only by your infinite being?

You tell us that you have already come, once upon a time, as a baby in the straw. You tell us that you have come, have settled in among us and shared our drab and ordinary lives, but to be honest, it is hard to see you in this place.

To be honest, your arrival often feels more like a departure.

You came as you promised, but you did not change our poor and finite sort of life as you lived it. Instead, you became like us in every regard.

You lived every moment carefully, not letting any sort of torment slip from your cupped hands. You felt deeply every drop of this life and suffered it all, right to the bleeding end.

You, too, felt death coming for you, steadily, relentlessly. You, too, when you looked up to the One who is called Father, begging for comfort in your pain and dread, were met with deafening silence.

Is this why you came? Is this birth in Bethlehem and death on Golgotha the coming that is to redeem all of us from our human misery? Are we to be comforted simply because you also wept and met your end?

No, now I begin to understand that we sing and pray this Come of hope and longing because you are still in the process of your coming. Your appearance as part of the very dirt you created was only the beginning of your coming.

You chose to rescue us from our misery by taking on our very misery and bringing it to the triumphant ending we could not have found. You alone are able to take the cross we all bear and change it into a triumphant banner of victory.

It is said you will come again, but again is misleading. It is said that you will appear again, and perhaps this is a better way of understanding because you have never really gone away. In all of our human existence you have never left us.

Behold, you come. Now it is still the one single hour of your Advent, at the end of which we too shall have found out that you have really come. O God who is to come, grant me the grace to live now, in the hour of your Advent, in such a way that I may merit to live in your forever, in the blissful hour of your eternity.

~ all quotes are from Karl Rahner (1904-1984), German Jesuit priest and theologian. Many of the ideas in this essay are also from him.

Be Still

Posted on December 9, 2016 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Be still.

Wait.

Be still and wait for God.

Be still and wait for God to come.

Advent is waiting and so we become still while we wait for Him to come down and rescue us.

We pause in our fighting and our striving, we rest from our grieving and our mourning, we stop to breathe in our busyness and our too much.

Just for a moment.

It doesn’t take any of it away. Yet.

But we become still like Moses with the Red Sea before and the Egyptian army after and we wait for God to fight for us.

We who have lived with the pain for far too long, we who have just received the phone call and sit at our kitchen table in stunned silence, we who can’t see how we will put one foot in front of the other much less get up from our beds in the morning, we who hide in our closets and weep our wracking sobs while we rock back and forth,

just for one moment we become still.

We remember that God is and that He is fighting for us.

It doesn’t solve or heal any of it. Yet.

But it will.

Oh, how it will.

We become still and we wait for Emmanuel. We wait for Emmanuel, God-with-us, to come down.

We wait in this season and we wait in this life for our Emmanuel to come down and fight and make it all okay again.

So for just a moment, take a breath and remember how He already did this once to show us that He will do it again.

Be still.

Wait.

edited from the archives

Mary’s Soul

Posted on January 1, 2016 by Elizabeth

There is a stillness and a hush.

There are words that shred her heart.

It is after the man of light, speaking words of miracle.

It is after the shepherds of dirt, speaking visions of angel army chorales.

It is after the star of God, shining spotlight on her baby.

It is after the scholars of heavens, laying rich treasures down.

There is the temple and the sacrifice and the consecration of a baby.

There is a man who raises hands and speaks words of praise to God.

There are words that shred her heart.

And a sword will pierce your own soul too.

There is a stillness and a hush.

And ever after, she lives and follows Him, trusting that God will keep His promises. She is faithful in her trust.

And she stands at the foot of a cross, watching her innocent child as He is brutally tortured and murdered. As He is pierced with a sword.

And her own soul is pierced as well.

It cannot have made any sense at all.

The murder of innocents never does. Death itself never does.

There is a cross.

There is ugliness and pain and sorrow and grief.

There is beauty and rescue and hope and the promise of life for all time.

There is faithfulness and trust in a God Who keeps His promises. Always.

In the stillness and the hush,

In the joy of angels singing

as well as in the piercing of your own soul,

Trust in our God whose Word never fails.

I pray for a joyful New Year for all of you, worshiping the God who makes all things beautiful in His time.

art credits: snow photo by Kirk Sewell; The Nativity by Correggio; The Three Crosses by Rembrandt; Cross photo by Asta Rastauskiene; Annunciation to the Shepherds by Nicolaes Pieterszoon Berchem; Pieta by Michaelangelo; Advent wreath photos by Elizabeth Giger

Be Still and Wait

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Elizabeth

Be still.

Wait.

Be still and wait for God.

Be still and wait for God to come.

Advent is waiting and so we become still while we wait for Him to come down and rescue us.

We pause in our fighting and our striving, we rest from our grieving and our mourning, we stop to breathe in our busyness and our too much.

Just for a moment.

It doesn’t take any of it away. Yet.

But we become still like Moses with the Red Sea before and the Egyptian army after and we wait for God to fight for us.

We who have lived with the pain for far too long, we who have just received the phone call and sit at our kitchen table in stunned silence, we who can’t see how we will put one foot in front of the other much less get up from our beds in the morning, we who hide in our closets and weep our wracking sobs while we rock back and forth,

just for one moment we become still.

We remember that God is and that He is fighting for us.

It doesn’t solve or heal any of it. Yet.

But it will.

Oh, how it will.

We become still and we wait for Emmanuel. We wait for Emmanuel, God-with-us, to come down.

We wait in this season and we wait in this life for our Emmanuel to come down and fight and make it all okay again.

So for just a moment, take a breath and remember how He already did this once to show us that He will do it again.

Be still.

Wait.

Small is Sacred

Posted on December 11, 2015 by Elizabeth

These feel like frightening times. The world at large keeps crashing into my small frame of reference.

It doesn’t feel as though I can do anything against the hatred, fear, and violence that keeps cropping up all around us.

Part of my helpless feeling comes from my own world currently being very small.

My days revolve around nursing babies, napping toddlers, and newly-become elementary students.

What I have to give, what I have to offer to stem this dark tide is small.

Our season in life leaves little room for discretionary income and time.

I wonder if anything I do makes much difference.

In this season of Advent, this season of preparing ourselves for the biggest Gift of all, the gifts that I bring to our God, to our world, seem insignificant, tiny.

Leaving my own book to read one more story aloud? Trifling.

Baking cookies to give to our neighbors? Inconsequential.

Giving up a meal out to purchase toys for a toy drive? Insufficient.

Yet as I read still another version of the Christmas Story to my girls I am reminded that an act does not have to be big to be sacred.

Small acts of kindness to those I know, small smiles and gentle words in passing to those who seem different from us, small gifts to strangers are all as sacred and beautiful as the act of preaching to thousands.

You don’t have to have endless resources to be able to change the world. You don’t have to accomplish something enormous to let a glimpse of light in to the darkness.

After all, what is Advent but the remembrance that it was the smallest, most fragile gift of all that was sacred enough to change our world forever.

Breath

Posted on December 4, 2015 by Elizabeth

All of creation waits with inhaled breath.

We wait as in the space before the upraised baton falls in the darkened symphony hall.

We wait as in the space before stepping over the threshold of home.

We wait as in the space before the first glimmer of dawn sparks into the darkest part of the night.

We wait with inhaled breath for the breath of God to arrive.

For the breath of God to arrive and breathe in the air of this world and breathe out the grace of heaven.

As we bundle ourselves against the cold and breathe out frost into the air, so we can’t help but breathe in a breath of hope even as we bundle our hearts against disappointment.

But God is a God of hope, so we can breathe easy and unbundle our hearts to the warmth of His love.

He did, after all, come once before and draw our air into His lungs and in so doing, foreshadowed the way He will come once again and exhale perfection into the very breath of the fabric of our world.

And so, as we wait with inhaled breath, we breathe out love and grace to those we see around us so that they, too, can breathe in a breath of hope

and wait for the breath of God to arrive in our world once more.

Hold On

Posted on November 27, 2015 by Elizabeth

Why do we expect a life free from ugliness?

Why do we think that we should ease through life surrounded by comforts?

Why do we think that we should be exempt from pain?

God promised, after all, that life will be hard, that life will be full of trouble.

And He promised that it would all be okay in the end.

He didn’t promise that we would see the end while still in this world, but He promised that it would be okay.

Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end. ~ John Lennon

So many died while still hoping for Messiah, still believing that He would come.

And He did.

So many of us will die while still hoping for God to come and make everything beautiful again.

And He will.

But not only that.

If that weren’t promise enough for you.

Not only has He promised that everything will be okay, but He promised that while it is still not okay, He will never leave us.

So hold on. Be still and hold on to those promises with everything in you and you will find that joy and peace that goes beyond anything that is happening around or inside you.

Hold on.

You who are watching her die before your very eyes.

Hold on.

You who are hurt by the one who should protect.

Hold on.

You who are frightened by all you see around the world.

Hold on.

You who feel like your life doesn’t matter.

Hold on.

He will never leave you. And someday it will be okay.

Art credits: dead rose photo by Deb Knoles; Christ on the Cross photo by Asta Rastauskiene; Nativity by Antonio da Correggio; Tulips in sunlight photo by Kirk Sewell Photography

Waiting

Posted on December 19, 2014 by Elizabeth

It is a time of waiting.

It is a time of waiting in darkness, of waiting in grief, of waiting in loneliness.

We are a people living in a land of darkness, in a land of the shadow of death, and as much as we would wish to skip the waiting and rush straight into the glorious light of Christmas, we are still living in Advent.

It is same as our desire to skip over the ugly of Good Friday and rush straight into the beauties of Easter Sunday. Yet we cannot get to the power of Easter without first living through the pain of Friday.

And we cannot get to the light and wonder of Christmas without first living through the darkness and tenuous hope of Advent.

Even our Christmas hymns hint at this. They speak of a longing for deliverance, a yearning for Immanuel, God with us.

O come, o come Immanuel and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here.

No more let sins and sorrows grow nor thorns infest the ground.

It is a time to linger with the deepest longing of our heart: the longing for God to come, the longing for God to make our world and our hearts right again.

Our world was a land of darkness with only the whisper of a light to come that anyone was able to hold on to.

And then.

And then the end of the story broke gloriously into the middle of the story. The Christ, the Messiah, the end of our story came bursting through with light and stars, with angels and worship.

The light came and shone upon the people living in a land of great darkness. The light arrived and we saw that the darkness was not the final word.

We still live in a land of darkness, but now we have more than a whisper. Now we have a glimpse of the Light Himself to hold on to. We have seen the breaking dawn and we know the end of the story.

It is still a time of waiting for yet another Advent.

It is still a time of waiting in the darkness. If we cannot linger through the darkness of our world’s need for the light, if we cannot dwell long in our own need for the darkness of our hearts to be banished, then we cannot ever reach the hope and joy of Christmas.

The deepness of the darkness is what shows us the glory of the light.

So wait. Linger in your waiting.

And then, when Advent is over, when Christmas Day finally arrives, you will be able to revel in the joy and hope of the light that came and that promises to come again.

This time to banish all darkness for good.

Art credit: The Adoration of the Shepherds by Charles Le Brun