Advent is Prayer

Advent is about prayer, just as prayer is about Advent. They weave in and through one another. Advent is our Christian season of New Year - our beginning place. It’s a graceful way of being invited to begin again. Prayer is much the same. It is a practice of wishing/yearning/longing for something to shift toward wholeness. Prayer is the spiritual practice that lives inside of us. Prayer breathes our faith. Advent is our season, our shared time of (re)learning the practice of slowing down. Advent is the season of preparing; prayer is our practice of waiting. All in one.
 
Advent calls for us to be present in this December time of longer nights. This season asks us to consider looking in the dark, even if we can’t yet see. It causes us to trust and believe. Advent doesn’t tell us to quit or give up. It invites us instead to slow down, to pay attention, to wait. Prayer can nudge us time and again from what is to what has always been and on to what is to be next. Shifts us from rushing through this hour, from enduring this day to where is it best to focus? What is holding me? Who is holding me in this moment? Time and again just that slowing down loosens my heart and sometimes even my head so that I am renewed – just enough to re-enter.
 
In her book Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams writes, “I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear.” 

I so love these words from Tempest Williams, “carrying my heart upward.” Advent’s arrival came this year at such a good time. My heart felt like it was spiraling down to places of overflowing grief, of aching and heartbreaking. These words remind me to see bigger, believe bigger, pray bigger. Her words encourage me to remember the daily gift of listening for our feathered friends. Each day our bird-guides are all around us with their morning and evening prayers. Fearful places can catch and entangle me – and - so can listening for and believing in each bird’s songprayer. Bird-by-bird (Oh wait, there’s a nudge from Anne LaMott, another writer/prophet – she’d be telling us to keep writing).
 
May it be so. Emmanuel. God is surely with us.  

​Thanks, Betsey for this sunrise picture from St. Mountain.

---