Sunday Collection: Advent

As we light the fourth and last advent candle it seems right to focus this week on posts that to me connect with the waiting period of advent and to the winter solstice, even when sometimes the connection is not explicit. And no shortage of great posts - I’ve had to leave out quite a few otherwise you’d still have been reading this collection on Boxing Day, so apologies to those who don’t feature here today.

First up is from No Impact Man, who in this time of waiting and preparation talks of his sadness at his wife’s miscarriage:

For just that moment, my heart broke open for the world. The sadness was not just mine. We all have it. We all suffer from it. I understood for those few seconds what my friend the Zen teacher meant by Universal Sadness. It means we are all in this thing together.

In Heads We’re Dancing, the Velveteen Rabbi talks of the connection between soul and body:

And the answer for periods of depression, for the soul sickness Rebbe Nachman knew well, lies not in the mind or spirit but in the body. So when I feel too depressed to pray, the answer is to don tallit and tefillin anyway, because the physicality of the action may reach me when reason and emotion wouldn’t get through.

Milton writes of a day of short-sightedness without his contacts or glasses and the lessons this literally out of focus day held for him:

The light bends in the darkness and the darkness cannot keep us from truly seeing.

In this week when Christians await the birth of a tiny Child, Abdur Rahman writes Our Children Are Our Teachers. He speaks beautifully of how parents must love, support, serve and learn from their children:

These qualities, which we struggle to embody, are also deeply spiritual. Compassion, mercy, service and selfless love are all essential aspects of a fully human being, and of a healthy relationship with God (the Blessed and Exalted). This is why I find being a father so profound, and so inspiring.

And talking of kids, if you want the “Ooohhh” factor, I suggest a quick visit to Take Joy where you can meet Thor and Nicholas, the newly born Yule Goats.

From goats to deer, as Cate marks the Winter Solstice with a trip to the frozen woods towing a toboggan full of food for the wild deer, many of whom are carrying the young they will bear in the spring.

There are flocks of chickadees and nuthatches dancing from branch to branch and chirping a merry greeting, the muffled thumps and slow even breathing of the patient deer in their winter yards nearby.

In Those Northern Skies, Melissa uses her own and others’ words with her exceptional photographs illustrating the bare bones of a snowy winter. My favourite of the quotes she uses is:

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.

Andrew Wyeth

And finally, my post yesterday got me thinking about putting together a video to celebrate winter and the Solstice. I almost wish it hadn’t because I was up until 1.30 in the morning finishing it! But I’m pleased with it, so here it is, a day late, to Solstice Bells by Jethro Tull:

Have a blessed Christmas week, everyone.