The Gentleness of Wisdom – Advent Meditation 2019
Times of transition signal occasions for renewal. We come to the ending of the Church Year and so to the beginning of yet another. The times of endings return us to our beginnings. Advent marks a new beginning. But what does it mean, these endings which bring us back to our beginnings? What does it mean to begin again? Is the cycle of the Church Year another dreary round of the same old things in the same old places with the same old faces? Or is it the dance of God’s grace and glory in human lives? “To make an end is to make a beginning,” T.S. Eliot observes for “the end is where we start from.” It is about the principle of our lives.
We come to the end of a year of grace and take stock of our lives in the light of God’s grace. It marks a kind of harvest-time for our souls, as it were, a gathering up of the fruits of the past year’s grace in our lives. But it means too, that we are returned to our beginning, to Him who is the foundation and meaning of our lives. The grace is God’s Word revealed and all because “Jesus turned.” The turnings of the year and our turnings turn upon God’s turning to us.
In the barren emptiness of nature’s year, “when yellow leaves or none or few do hang/ upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/ bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang” (Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73), Christ strides across the barren fields of humanity to gather us into the barn of his righteousness and truth. We are returned to him who is “the Lord our Righteousness,” our Judge and King, the Shepherd and the Healer of all mankind, the Alpha and the Omega of all creation. Our endings and our beginnings all meet in him. Basil the Great suggests what this means.
As all the fruits of the season come to us in their proper time,
flowers in spring, corn in summer and apples in autumn,
so the fruit for winter is talk.
Talk, you may protest, thank you very much, but we have had quite enough talk, too much talk, especially preachers’ talk. But talk about what, you might ask? What is the talk in the times of endings, the fruit for winter’s evening, the talk which marks the occasions for renewed beginnings? Surely, it is God’s talk, God’s Word and no other, God’s Word making his talk in us. For apart from God’s talk, our talk is vain and destructive. “The tongue,” as St. James notes, “is a fire. The tongue is an unrighteous member…With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who are made in the likeness of God.” Such are our contradictions. “From the same mouth come blessing and cursing.” As he says, “My brethren, this ought not to be so.” But sadly it is, for “no human being can tame the tongue.”