6 December 2023 A Candle in the Window Peter Millar
Words to encourage us in these times.
Words for Advent:
I shall stand at my post. I shall take up my position on the watchtower, keeping a look-out to learn what the Lord says to his people. Habakkuk 2:1
I remember a friend saying to me that in uncertain times often the only thing we can do is to wait and to be watchful. It is a great insight. It reminds me of that other saying: ‘In a dark time, the eye sees’ – I think often more clearly than in calmer times. And for Habakkuk, positioned on the watchtower, it was a time to keep faithful and to listen for the Lord’s words. So it is with Advent. A time of watching: of waiting; of listening; of being still before the Sustainer and Creator of all. Surrendering our life to the creative action of Love and to the gift of God’s grace in our hearts.
In the course of one month, through its daily prayers, the international, ecumenical Iona Community remembers all the nations on earth. A few countries are prayed for on each day. And as we hear the names of the countries we can pray for specific events or situations in them. It is a daily spiritual exercise which keeps the mind globally alert. Some countries we may know little about, but we hold them and their peoples in prayer before the One who holds the whole word in His hands. In other words, as I understand it, we place that country into God’s embrace for another day.
That kind of praying is rooted in an openness to God’s guidance. It is not merely about us or our own ideas. In a sense, it’s being on the watchtower – aware that all around is a world permeated and sustained by God’s healing and hope. But also a world which is a witness to conflict, grinding poverty and unimaginable disconnection, as well as to beauty, laughter and extraordinary signs of compassion.
As we prepare to once again celebrate the birth of Jesus, may we seek from God’s goodness a heart which is open to the world in all of its contradiction and possibility. To recognise the sacredness of ordinary life in fresh ways. Or in the wonderfully insightful words of the poet Les Murray: “the ordinary mail of the otherworld, wholly common, not postmarked divine”.
These words are taken from ‘Light of the World: Daily Readings for Advent’ Peter Millar and Neil Paynter, Wild Goose Publications ISBN: 978-1-905010-63-9, www.ionabooks.com
On Bingley Moor, West Yorkshire, UK:
This is bruising, buffeting weather, gusting winds, slanting rain, dished out across drenched green farmland under the shifting canopy of silver-lit cloud. It’s not weather that needs any additional shape or texture – I can feel its heft every time the wet westerly slaps me across the chops. But still, that’s what birds do – the hard-flying woodpidgeons cutting across the grain of the weather, the crows and jackdaws showboating on the updraughts, the buzzard banking low through the rain – they bring a sort of embodiment to the high tidal currents of climate and weather.
As I make a slow way up towards the moors, a great cloud of fieldfares erupts into the grey from a stand of bent-backed trees. It’s as many as I’ve seen in one place – 700 plus, I guess. The flock tilts on the camber of the wind and comes coursing back overhead. I can hear their worried chatter over the weather noise. I watch for a bit, but I don’t want to disturb their berry-picking. It seems to have been a pretty good berry year round here; hopefully that will mean a good year for the winter thrushes (though even thrushes fat on autumn berries will struggle if a hard frost bites).
I pass a dead rabbit in the last field before the moor edge. It’s lying crushed under the capstone of a drystone wall. Someone, I suppose, found it poorly by the path – myxomatosis, “the white blindness” of Watership Down, remains endemic among wild rabbits – and did the hard, kind thing. Then the moor, and the peat, and the burnt-black heather, and the great ribbons of rainwater carving apart the hillside. The black soil is saturated.
I make it up to the stark plateau of Bingley Moor before the rain really comes after me. I’m squelching through a cold stew of streaming water, mud and clammy November air, deeply, profoundly, importantly wet, but happy, even so, as the path becomes less path than puddle, and red grouse – the privileged pets of Bingley Moor Estate – come leaping out of the wet rush grasses around me. Eventually, the rising wave of the landscape breaks, and Wharfedale falls away below me. From an article by Richard Smyth in The Guardian UK.
Renewing Christ,
let us wait, let us listen, let us dream.
Let us be watchful.
Let us see visions of love, peace and justice.
Let us see Earth’s healing
and understanding among peoples
even in these times of war.
Peter
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
– Dr Martin Luther King
