Advent Meditation: The Gentleness Of Wisdom
“Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good life,
let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom”
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? Are we simply trapped in a never-ending cycle, like squirrels on an endless fly-wheel? 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?
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.
’In the greyness of the year, comes Christ the King’ (with apologies to T.S. Eliot). 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 shows us something of 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 enough talk, too much talk in fact, especially, no doubt, preachers’ talk! But talk about what, you might ask? What is the talk in the times of endings, the fruit for winter’s evenings, the talk which marks the occasions for renewed beginnings?
