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Last
year during Advent, I took advantage of a free twenty-four hours at a
place of solitude in rural Missouri. A group of privately vowed women
who had been given the gift of farm land opened three hermitages on the
property and offered “free solitude times” to get themselves and their
magnificent spot known. I shall never forget the sense of peace and
utter wholeness as I sat in the small hermitage and looked out over the
rolling hills parched by late fall, early winter frost. Though the
fields were covered with the gold of straw rather than growing wheat,
in the silence and stillness it seemed the life beneath the soil was
more obvious, more vibrant. No green, no growth as distractions, just
the reality that in the depth of soil and earth’s darkness life was
stirring and would someday show itself. The total quiet and immobility
of the setting comforted and soothed me, in fact renewed me.
The
next morning I awakened to a steadily whitening world as one of
winter’s blasts descended upon the area. Though the hermitage continued
in its sublime stillness, the demands of life beyond those hallowed
fields beckoned. It was time to gather what little I had brought and
head into the storm. I carried with me the peace of the previous day
and the credo that acknowledged new life beneath and beyond what I
could see. But I knew in that same moment a more profound truth: Earth
can be trusted.
The glory of that time was not the personal
peace I experienced, though once I would have been grateful for merely
that gift, but rather it was the knowledge that even in the face of
nature’s changes and demands, the uncertainty that nature can present,
Earth still pulses with life and the power needed for new life to
occur. Hidden in Earth is the hope of recreation. Beneath the surface
Earth gathers energy that will burst forth when the time is right.
Advent
this year is like Earth. In this time we set apart to touch the deeper
realities, do I trust the surge to new life even amidst a world weary
of war and hate? Do I trust the urge to gather with people who are
hope-givers? Do I believe that I can contribute to that essential
group? Do I trust that there is the will to stand together against the
forces of despair and desolation? Do I trust above all the challenging
invitation to make peace, to respect, to accept and work toward harmony
with what is different, with what is “other?”
Advent like
Earth calls me to see beneath it all and there find the source of new
life. There will be no journey to the far off fields this year. But
tapping into Earth’s darkness, and my own, will continue. I still trust
that new life and action for real change require that journey.
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