Fourth Sunday in Advent

For this, the fourth Sunday in Advent, I find deep pleasure in the waiting, through these words.

I offer first this Annie Dillard quote from "God in the Doorway"*, her short and oft-quoted essay found in the superb Teaching a Stone to Talk. The quote (indeed the entire essay) seems especially appropriate as a meditation for the Advent season.

I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.


And, second, these few lines from poet Marge Piercy's "Shabbat moment" from The Art of Blessing the Day**:

. . . This is the time
for letting time go
like a released balloon
dwindling.
Tilt your neck and let
your face open to the sky
like a pond catching light
drinking the darkness.


And, not least, these lovely lines from "O Oriens"*** by Malcolm Guite, whose introduction to me I owe to my friend Diane:

. . . So every trace of light begins a grace

In me, a beckoning. The smallest gleam
Is somehow a beginning and a calling;
"Sleeper awake, the darkness was a dream

For you will see the Dayspring at your waking,
Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking."


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* http://mcwright.blogs.com/veritas_mc_wright/2005/12/god_in_the_door.html

** Knopf, 2005; Copyright © 1999.
 http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry/

*** The complete poem is here.