Journey to healing

Today is the second Sunday of Advent which is the beginning of the Christian Calendar. We begin a new year by preparing our lives and world for the coming of Christ among us. For the next three Sundays we will light an Advent candle reminding us of the coming of Christ, the light of the world, and inviting us to be the light.

To be light in the world is not to be reduced to “believing the right beliefs” in our head. Rather it is about doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with God.  It is about camping out for social justice.  #Umbrella-movement Hong K.


Grace and Peace to you

You remember the first two steps of the Alcoholics Anonymous [AA] 12 step programme? The first step: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable. The second step: We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

And so what AA teaches us is that a journey to healing — indeed a journey to sanity (clear lucid living and loving) — begins with two crucial ingredients or it doesn’t begin at all. The first is humility (admit there are aspects of our life that are unmanageable). The second is hope (trust that there is a greater Power that can take over management).

Both of these ingredients were found in last week’s readings that marked the first week of Advent which is nothing else than a journey to healing and sanity for the world.

We heard the humble cry from the Advent prophet Isaiah: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down….” [Isaiah 64]. We can feel the powerlessness of the prophet to overcome the unbridgeable distance that is felt to exist between himself and God. We hear his desire for visitation and his longing for company yet he is unable to secure it for himself. The prophet has run out of rope. He has no more tricks up his sleeve. If there is going to be a reunion with the Lord it is going to have to happen because the Lord has decided to act and act in no less a dramatic way than to rip the heavens apart.

We also heard the recurring refrain from the Advent Psalmist: “Restore us O God of hosts. Let your face shine that we may be saved.” [Ps 80]. There is hope! Yes, there is hope. Our inadequacy will not have the last word. By grace our inadequacy will lead us to the last word. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

At the risk of being ridiculously over simplistic (St. Paul would say ‘foolish’) I suggest that there are areas of our living that never find sanity for the simple reason that we refuse to admit our powerlessness and trust the Lord’s power. To hand over the captain’s armband of our life and to bring in new management.

Try it and see, Grace, Alan


Advent Prayer of Preparation

What is Hope?
It is a presentiment that imagination is more real
and reality less real than it looks.

It is a hunch
that the overwhelming brutality of facts
that oppress and repress is not the last word.

It is a suspicion
that reality is more complex
than realism wants us to believe
and that the frontiers of the possible
are not determined by the limits of the actual
and that in a miraculous and unexpected way
life is preparing the creative events
which will open the way to freedom and resurrection….

The two, suffering and hope, live from each other.
Suffering without hope
produces resentment and despair,
hope without suffering
creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness….

Let us plant dates
even though those who plant them will never eat them.
We must live by the love of what we will never see.
This is the secret discipline.
It is a refusal to let the creative act
be dissolved in immediate sense experience
and a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren.

Such disciplined love
is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints
the courage to die for the future they envisaged.
They make their own bodies
the seed of their highest hope.

Rubem Alves – Brazilian Theologian