Waiting in the Wilderness: Poets & the Prophet Isaiah, Advent Quiet Day, St. George’s Halifax
Fr. David Curry delivered this Advent Quiet Day address and homily at St. George’s Round Church, Halifax, on 9 December 2023. Click here to download a pdf version of this post, complete with footnotes.
Waiting in the Wilderness: Poets & the Prophet Isaiah
Advent Quiet Day , St. George’s Halifax
9 December 2023
(Fr. David Curry)
Part One
Our Advent Quiet Day is a time of prayerful attention to what certain poets have to say about the mystery of God’s coming to us and our coming to God as informed in some fashion by Isaiah, the great prophet of Advent. My hope is that these texts will deepen our understanding and strengthen our wills. Some passages from Isaiah and a selection of poems are offered for your quiet meditation and reflection.
Advent is our waiting in the wilderness upon the motions of God coming to us. What is that waiting? It is our watching and wanting, our looking and desiring; in short, it is prayer. What is the wilderness? It is, as Isaiah will show us, very much about ourselves, the wilderness of our hearts which contributes to various other forms of wilderness. The simple point is that the wilderness is not a place without humans; it is about a kind of wildness within us, the wilderness of sin.
The images of the wilderness in Isaiah look back to the story of Creation and the Fall in Genesis but with a wonderful kind of poignancy that moves our hearts and minds. “Let me sing for my beloved,” Isaiah 5 begins, “a love song concerning his vineyard. My beloved had a vineyard … and he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.”
What more was there to do for my vineyard,
that I have not done in it?
When I looked for it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes?
And now I will tell you
what I shall do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down.
I will make it a waste;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and briers and thorns shall grow up;
I will also command the clouds
that they rain no rain upon it.
For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the men of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
and he looked for justice,
but behold bloodshed;
for righteousness,
but behold a cry!
The wilderness in us turns the paradise of God’s creation into a wilderness outside us, the waste land of T.S.Eliot’s poem by that name, itself shaped by the imagery of Isaiah. Yet the wilderness, too, is the place of prayer.
Prayer at once acknowledges what we want but as such do not have. Yet it assumes and anticipates that there is an ultimate good in which we participate now. Prayer is both human desire and divine gift, as Fr. Robert Crouse so concisely put it, the divine gift which alone redeems our desires without which they are incomplete and partial, essentially dead and empty. “My soul is athirst for God, yea, even the living God,” the psalmist reminds us. Our sojourning in the wilderness is about our desire for wholeness, “like as the hart desires the water-brooks.” Prayer and wilderness belong to our yearning for something absolute, for “here have we no continuing city” but “desire a better country, that is an heavenly,” as Hebrews puts it. We are, as it were, sojourners in the wilderness longing and seeking for the true homeland of the spirit.