Tea drinking ... and waiting for the right moment

I'm a tea drinker. I do also drink coffee but given the choice I would really rather drink tea - plain, no milk no sugar and preferably not out of a bag.
Because even after Advent and Christmas all times are still waiting times, and because now there is time to drink in rather differently the words from the wonderful anderer Adventskalendar, we are reading the days one more time before putting it away. This evening I have turned it to a page with a photo of a splendidly chaotic Asian tea kitchen and come across this wonderful reflection from the 16th century on the right moments to drink tea, here's my on the hoof translation:

Moments that are just right for drinking tea

When your heart and hands are doing nothing
When you are tired after reading too much poetry
When one's train of thought is disturbed
When listening to songs and melodies
When a song has been sung to its end
When you're home alone on a holiday
When playing Ch'in and looking at paintings
In the middle of the night in deep conversation
Faced with a clear window and a clean desk
When the day is clear and the breeze mild
On a day with gentle rain
In a painted boat near a wooden bridge
When the children are at school
When you've lit incense in a small workroom.
Hsü Ts'eshu

Tea drinking is about taking time out, it's a longer drink that a shot of expresso and more satisfying. My favourite moment for drinking tea is in bed in the morning, listening to the radio - especially if Dr B brings it to me. My second favourite moment is letting the tea go cold, not drinking tea because I have fallen asleep again. Something I can't do unless the tea is actually there to go cold. Some of my favourite cups of tea are the ones I never drink but am nevertheless grateful for.
Meanwhile I realise that I have never known that strange thirst for tea from reading too much poetry, but I do know a thirst from a desire for poetry to be fulfilled - for that I am still waiting. In the meantime perhaps all of us should write a crazy list of moments in life that are just right for taking a bit of time out for a cup of something refreshing.

Fragments of Advent understanding - a sermon

They held up a stone.
I said, "Stone."
Smiling they said, "Stone."

They showed me a tree.
I said, "Tree."
Smiling they said, "Tree."

They shed a man's blood.
I said, "Blood."
Smiling they said, "Paint."

They shed a man's blood.
I said, "Blood."
Smiling they said, "Paint."

copyright (c) Dannie Abse, Adapted from the Hebrew of Amir Gilboa, 1982

Bible Reading - Isaiah 42:1-4
Matthew 3:1-12
Fragments of Advent understanding - a sermon preached in the ecumenical centre chapel

First the bad news - Manoj and Hielke are travelling so you get me again …
and be warned, next year it will be different you will all be doing the prayers and the preaching!

And now for more bad news:
Sorry but Advent is not all about the cute little baby

So I offer you some fragments

In the knowledge that they will not make a perfect whole

In the hope that this incompleteness will leave room for some of your fragments too

Earlier this year I spent some time whispering into the ear of a delightful, charming and erudite man called Floribert Bahizire, a leading human rights advocate and Director of an NGO in the Democratic Republic of Congo called "La Voix des Sans-Voix pour les Droits de l’Homme"

Six weeks later in early June the world learnt of his and his driver's death in suspicious circumstances. The two of them treated like paint. Their humanity and blood denied.

And in Advent we read and hear Isaiah's words from the suffering servant:

"He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smouldering wick"

And I think oh really?

I hear my mother in law's voice saying to me that she really has had enough of all these prayers saying that God cares for all those who are suffering - "I don't think he does you know. And how does that help them, what is God doing?"

Hmmm…

We can all think of people like Floribert - the bruised reeds or smouldering wicks who have been snapped off or snuffed out or raped or beaten - we may even refer to some of them as martyrs or saints

And there are also those too numerous to mention or comprehend who have died in genocide, war, famine and injustice: Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda, gulags, gas chambers, the disappeared

"He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smouldering wick he will faithfully bring forth justice."

Upholding human rights, upholding the humanity of humanity …seeking to bear witness not to paint but to the blood which courses in all of our veins. It is a painstaking and often dangerous task. Truth creates enemies.

And as I think about that challenge I think of the many times in my own life when I have been more on the side of paint than of blood. Advent is such a time of reflection, a time to contemplate judgement as well as the promise of joy.

Let me give you a small example from parish life in France. It was not a good day. The previous night's elders meeting had lasted until 1am, the morning's meeting of "les amis de l'orgue" - the friends of the organ - seemed to have resolutely decided to become the enemies of the pastor. I walked from my study out into the garden, in need of some springtime hope and as I got to the fruit garden my heart sank, there was the parishioner who "helped" (I use the term advisedly) with the garden with a large pile of twigs in front of her. I could see that they came from my gooseberry bushes which would now have no chance of bearing fruit.

Let's just say I wasn't happy and I let her know it.

She was probably the poorest member of the parish. After the failure of her marriage she had become addicted to antidepressants but had overcome that, her daughter was on methadone, she didn't have a garden of her own. And on this lovely sunny morning even the pastor was shouting at her.

"He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smouldering wick he will faithfully bring forth justice."

His winnowing-fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing-floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.

A further and final fragment
A friend is talking about the empty evening ahead while feeling lonely and exhausted after a heavy travel programme. She suddenly said, "I think I shall go home and pray." And I realised she hardly ever had the time or energy to pray and that having and making that time is also a privilege … do I use my privileged praying time well?
Centuries ago St Augustine said "without God we cannot, without us God will not". Prayer and ethics, spirituality and practice belong together
All of us are imperfect pilgrims trying to make those two ends meet.
Sometimes we ourselves are the bruised reeds and guttering wicks

He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth;

Even when things are in fragments the Advent promise carries us forwards.
Because of and despite our limitations we continue to bear hope, to dare to believe

Last week Floribert's successor was here in Geneva, and is taking the work of his NGO for human rights in DRC forwards.

So here's the good news
It is all about the suffering servant baby
About God's vulnerability and choice of the insignificant stable rather than the pompous palace.
About God the almighty accepting even to be powerless and dependent.

In British folklore parents tell their children that babies are found underneath the gooseberry bush - (given how thorny gooseberry bushes are this may say something about British attitudes to sexuality). Two years after the pruning incident in my garden I came home to discover a basket of freshly picked gooseberries on my doorstep. There had been a bumper harvest but I had moved house in the meantime, someone else was harvesting from the fruit bushes I had planted.

We are called to prophetic anger at abuses that treat people like paint and pawns rather than flesh and blood.
But in Adventide we are called even more to be fragments filled with the promise of peace and justice, reeds and wicks pointing to the possibility, to the certainty of future fruit even if we will not ourselves be the harvesters.

For most surely, God's suffering One from the stable will enflame our hearts and redress all that is broken within us.
Amen

Copyright (c) Jane Stranz / WCC

Kennings for Advent are you a lotus eater or a locust eater?

At morning prayer today I invited those of us there to think poetically in kennings about Advent as we reflected on the reading about John the Baptist from Mark's gospel ... as we meditated in silence our reflection was occasionally broken by a kenning. I think I shall try it again for tomorrow.
Sandal untier, water baptiser, sackcloth wearer, locust eater, honey swallower, truth proclaimer, messiah announcer ...

And as I thought about locust eater I also thought about lotus eater and realised to my shame taht I am the latter not the former.

Later this week I am invited to attend lunch for the 10th anniversary of the Ecumenical Adovocacy Alliance which campaigns on food justice and HIV. May I should suggest the locust eater-lotus eater idea to them. Probably it's too literary to work ...
Anyway at least morning prayer got my brain working.

Antiphonally yours ...

Time for me to confess that I am always rather grumpy about Christmas - I'm not quite sure when this started, I think when I was at university and received presents I just didn't want and felt bad about it all. So I took refuge in doing night duty at the Samaritans and taking Christmas services. Now in recent years I have been privileged to travel - last year to Venice, before that Berlin. It feels a bit selfish, but I'm happy trying to do Christmas my way for now.

I am terrible at buying presents and not even very gracious at receiving them and yet I love the Christmas story, the repetition of words and narratives that continue to speak to me. And I love the wonderful quiet liminal time of waiting that is Advent.

This morning we prayed the great Advent antiphones for the first time this Advent, I love the images, the memories of candles lit in the past and the glory of the music to O Come O Come Emmanuel - Chantez chantez il vient à notre appel combler nos coeurs Emmanuel. That French version "he comes to fill our hearts" is one I particularly love.

This morning's liturgy, during which we were privileged to hear John's gospel and the passage from Genesis read in Chinese by visitors from the China Christian Council, can be found here - with antiphones of course!

Midwifery for the barren - Advent thoughts

Midwifery for the barren

She is caught, between two men and her passion
She is caught wanting to give birth to the future
But has lost her voice
They control the money and the power
She no longer even controls her emotion

For a seemingly endless few weeks the belly of her future seemed empty
She was bereft of tomorrow
No heartbeat could be detected
But the pain and the tears...

Small everyday petty betrayal gnawed at her sense of self
Yet the depression has been a tool
And now she senses the future might once more be quickening
How to overcome her fear and midwife a future
Shining with a passion for integrity and not hatred
How to midwife a future of light and meaning

So this barren woman will bear the birthpangs
And the pushing
And the long hard labour
Yet if the men who know the joy of having children
Insist on carrying away the power as their right
The future will continue to be stillborn
And the only one to notice will be her
For they are lost in their dreams of control

She will not let her intellect be appeased
Nor her sense of humour depart
Without laughter the future will remain barren
Without joy there is no heartbeat
Even and especially the barren have a stake in the future

Throughout she will be challenged by her own preaching
And the vision she received through her tears
Only together can they do this
Only together

Will she find strength once more in generosity
And learn to go forwards, wounded but not bitter
Controlling the story … and giving it away

On being a midwife - are women really that subversive

I had a wonderful and powerful conversation with a good friend today. We talked of midwifery and the pain of our roles, trying to birth something into being and being hindered and held back, sometimes by not daring enough to be ourselves, to take on what my friend calls "our grace-filled subversive role as women". She pointed to the five women cited in Christ's genealogy in Matthew's gospel as being powerful subversive models in different sorts of ways:
Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba and "Miriam of Nazareth" - as my friend always calls her.

These women, inscribed through grace into the history of a male saviour, bear the future subversively, carry children in their bellies and give birth to the future despite everything - being seen as prostitutes, foreigners, wife of the wrong man, single mothers ...
Of course even the men God chooses to write salvation history through are hardly the handsome hero types - Moses has a speech impediment, David is the youngest son (and becomes more than just a bit of a philanderer), Abraham is such a man's man that he pretends his wife is his sister to get himself out of a sticky situation ... Cain kills his brother, Jacob steals his brother's blessing...

Then of course there is Joseph. If he had dared perhaps Shakespeare would have said Joseph was cuckolded by God. Earlier this week my friend challenged we female midwives to think about Joseph as a midwife, certainly as a birth attendant, at Jesus's birth. So many male partners are the only ones there to help new life into the world, to tend to the women they love at this most critical of times. Just as there are female doctors so there are also male midwives.
As we trangress and bend gender roles all of us take on some of the power of the subversives.
That subversive power is graced by God.
Happy Advent, happ waiting.

Swords into Ploughshares on World Aids Day

Today is World Aids Day.

Here on the Franco-Swiss border the world has turned not red but white as the heaviest snowfall in decades hits this part of the world. Many of the local campaigning plans for the day have had to be rescheduled, that's weather for you.

Colleagues at the Ecumencical Advocacy Alliance in Geneva launched their Advent Calendar today. It's a thoughtful and beautiful resource with contributions from around the world. It lasts for the whole of Advent - right up until January 6th which is Christmas Eve in many Orthodox countries and churches. So you get to wait and reflect for quite a bit longer.

Today's opening reflection comes from Canon Gideon Byamugisha, Christian Aid's HIV AIDS goodwill ambassador:
"Our faith insists we develop a prophetic imagination that works towards safer, healthier and more peaceful, equitable and fulfilling living that makes war history."

Week after week I talk to visitors groups about sowrds into ploughshares - the key text from Isaiah and Micah which begins this year's Advent readings. It was a surprise to see the text through this different lens of health and peace. Making war history also means working for just health for all.

Advent ist Dezember - well not quite

In order to try and cut down on earlier and earlier Christmas commercialism the German churches have run a campaign called "Advent ist Dezember" Advent is in December. the only problem being of course that it isn't quite only in December most years.

Be that as it may I am enjoying two wonderful German Advent calendars. The first is pictured here and comes from "Der andere Advent". There are lovely pictures, reflections and poems on each daily double spread and it's deeply satisfying as well as being fun.

The other was brought home to me by Dr B and is the epd Advent calendar it's made on 25 cards like the "do not disturb" signs you hang on your door in a hotel. It's beatifully produced and I'm looking forward to reading the thoughts and biblical texts for each day.

And then also today my Alternativity star boxes and Epiphany boxes arrived, I'm looking forward to giving these away over the next few days.

Meanwhile my colleagues at the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance are calling on folk to sign up for their daily online Adventcalendar. They launch on world AIDS Day December 1.

The mysterious word becomes flesh

Working and worshiping in a multilingual environment I end up having not entirely theological thoughts about the vagaries of biblical translation.
Does it change the meaning when the glories of the prologue to John's gospel are translated in the masculine, feminine or neuter? Suzanne Mccarthy has written much more eruditely than I could on whether logos is best translated as he, she or it.
This morning as we met for the final Monday morning prayers of the year I pondered the meaning or significance of gendered renderings of logos into our various langauges. German is clear with its neuter das Wort, French varies between le Verbe and la Parole depending on the translation. English - a normally ungendered language - nearly always refers to the Word as he, sometimes even as He.
Suzanne quotes Joel on John's prologue:
I believe that by using ‘it’, we allow John to breathe a bit, free of theology and dogma.

This morning I realised that the different translations and languages helped me to glimpse and comprehend in some small way the significance of the mystery of the ungendered gendered word becoming flesh.
The first of the great Advent antiphones begins with wisdom, sophia or logos. As we prayed and lit candles, sang and listened and kept silence we celebrated something of the known unknown mystery of the word or wisdom becoming flesh.

O wisdom, coming forth from the Most High,
filling all creation and reigning to the ends of the earth;
come and teach us the way of truth. Amen.
Come, Lord Jesus.

The loneliness of conscience

Last week I posted a quote from some editing I was doing to my facbook page. Written by Alison Phipps who is a member of the Iona community, you'll be able to find the quote in the new year in a book called "telling Peace" linked to the Advent resources which the WCC has put online. The book is about story-telling as a way of encouraging peace-building, story telling as a way of overcoming the violence inherent in our lives.
The quote I put on my facebook status was "I worry for the colleague I found in tears at his desk, overwhelmed, just utterly overwhelmed by the unrelenting slaveries of unmeetable deadlines, inflexible colleagues, the loneliness of conscience."
That phrase "the loneliness of conscience" really struck a chord with me as I know that it did with another friend who has gone through a very difficult time. In terms of leadership and of organisational systems the loneliness of conscience is quite a challenge. How do you encourage "conscience" in and among colleagues? If an organisation relies upon "lonely conscience" is this actually a way of scapegoating people, pushing work downwards onto those already doing too much? I have also been thinking about Social Darwinist ideas and how it is very easy for work place structures to passively fall back on social darwinist ways of operating when there is not sufficient relational trust in the systems. Making life for the lonely conscientious individual even more difficult.
So how do we tell our stories of the workplace in ways that build peace, increase trust and create healthier non social-darwinist organisational strucutures?
The workplace is a professional environment but it is also a social and emotional environment which can end up making individuals very lonely. Telling the stories of the complex places we work in is challenging, it's not just a leadership and management task, it's also a theological task.
"Blessed are those whose conscience is lonely, for the dawn shall rise warmly upon them."

Original blessing - an Advent promise

We met to pray, rejoice celebrate and lament together last night for an advent service on the theme of original blessing. Children painted stars on bands of papers with the word blessing in many languages. Terry Macarthur led out singing and music in wonderful ways and Theo Gill preached a funny and profound sermon.
The new CEC central committee joined us as they are meeting in Geneva at the moment and had just elected their new president, Metropolitan Emmanuel of France.
Here's an extract from Theo's sermon:

This blessing comes before that first infraction, that earliest act of disobedience, that willing submission to the serpent’s wiles. From the beginning, God’s will has been for our well-being; the operative verb in God’s intent for us is not “to judge”, nor “to punish” nor even “to predestine”, but “to bless” – to bless with the gift of light, even in a land of deep darkness – especially in a land of deep darkness – to bless with the gifts of life and grace and truth.

The Hebrew word for “bless” is barak.

(Where I come from, the president is called “Barack”. His name originates from that same Semitic root, making its way through Kenya to Hawaii, and then by way of
Indonesia, Columbia University, Harvard Law School and Chicago into the White House.
Barack… A word of blessing from the White House! And phrased in Arabic! So far, it is more a sign of hope than attainment – rather like the Nobel Prize… or the angelic vision of Peace on earth.)

World Aids Day - liturgy and photos from the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance

For the 21st international world Aids day colleagues from the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance organised a lunchtime serivce in the chapel at the Ecumenical Centre, you can see some of the photos. The service was put together by the brilliant Terry Macarthur and you can download versions in various languages. Here's an extract:

People: Do not let those who wait for you be put to shame.
Reader: I lift up Mary from the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. She was raped and afterwards unable to find medical care. Many in the camp are living with HIV but she is afraid to take the test. She defends herself, “I have no friends. No one talks to me and the worst thing is that no one, no one wants to hold my baby.”
Leader: Let them be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous.
People: Make me to know your ways, O LORD; teach me your paths.

More slowing down Advent resources - change your climate

There are some wonderful Advent resources from the Church of England here.

It's all about slowing down. So take some time, watch some ot the videos and slow down.

"We hope for a world in which we have learned to live with the grain of things, to live patiently, to live respectfully, to live in a way that takes our environment seriously..."
Dr. Rowan Williams

Noah's Ark and Advent liturgy for creation justice

My friend Marie Martel is doing scrapbooking and I told her my only experience of doing scrapbooking was with Remembered Bible earlier this year in Windermere. This gave her an idea and she's just done her first "Bible et scrap" on Noah's Ark. I must ask her for an electronic copy of the text she's used here.
Her scrapbook reminded me that one of the British initiatives for climate justice within the churches is called operation Noah - they're having some financial problems at the moment and need all the support you can give them, but they are still doing excellent work as are the Christian Ecology Link.
At our morning service in the ecumenical centre today we used the 350 drum beats liturgy with prayers from the different regions of the world. It worked very well, weaving a rainbow while listening to the drum beats and praying the Advent antiphones. Towards the end of the service after saying aloud the promise God makes to Noah and lighting the first candle on the Advent wreath, we kept silence, hoping that there would be no more drum beats and that the world would not go beyond the 350 parts per million of carbon.
As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, day and night,
shall not cease.’ Gen. 8.22

Resistance - the price of saying no and the springboard of virtue

On this Advent Sunday I have been reading more about resistance as I wait for the coming of God's republic of justice and joy.

Jacques Tarnero in the final essay in the book pictured here recalls Marc Bloch citing how Hitler in Rauschning said "We are right to speculate on human vice rather than human virtue. The French revolution appealed to virtue. We should rather do the opposite..."
Bloch comment on this is "That a French person is to be forgiven for preferring the teaching of Montesquieu's revolution to this message: the popular State needs the springboard of virtue".
Tarnero points out that of course many have also been
killed in the name of virtue. Nevertheless, and despite virtue seemingly being an unfashionable term, he claims that it is the (pre)condition for the very idea of resistance. Without the demands of virtue what would the limits be between what is acceptable and what is intolerable.
He ends his essay with this quote from Adam Michnik written from prison in Poland in 1984:
"Dans la vie de chaque homme vient un moment où pour dire simplement: ceci est noir et ceci est blanc, il faut payer très cher. Ce peut être le prix de la vie. À ce moment le problème principal n'est pas de connaître le prix à payer, mais de savoir si le blanc est blan et le noir noir. Pour cela il faut garder une conscience."


Les éditions autrement have brought out a series called "our values" - there are various titles on justice, friendship, citizenship and the one pictured here on resistance.
The series received support from the French mutual insurance company Macif's cultural foundation.

Drum beats, bell ringing, musical notes, bead-threading - act for climate justice

Listen to the drumbeat of creation, weave a rainbow, act now for climate justice make the world leaders hear!
The seven days of creations were the inspiration for the liturgy we've just posted online. 350 drumbeats, 50 for each of the seven days of creation. After each day is read out from Genesis so also one of the great Advent Antiphones is read. Colleagues from different regions of the world have written cries and hopes of and for climate justice.

Here are cries and hopes from the Pacific:

Atua! Your Pacific people call out to you, even as the waters continue to rise...
hear our prayer, we who trust in your love!
Atua! Your Pacific people call out to you, even as our land disappears before our eyes...
hear our prayer, we who hope in your love!
Atua! Our strength! Our life! Our love!

Meanwhile the Danish Council of Churches have put together a great liturgy for bellringing including a powerful hymn by Torsten Borbye Nielsen called bells of the world and an English translation by Edward Broadbridge. They've also got a specially commissioned piece of music with 350 notes in it. A stimulus to creativity - will you be ringing bells, threading beads, beating drums, singing hymns - to get the world to hear the case for climate justice?

Here's the two final verses of the hymn:

For though we know
we should rise higher,
we are consumed by our desire;
hear how our earth, ravaged, consumed,
calls for our care, or we are doomed.
May we free Earth from its pain;
give us hope that once again
Your will be done.

In hope and faith
we shall not cease
striving to make a world at peace,
for all that lives, from pole to pole,
from east to west, from soul to soul.
Lord, our God, whose mighty Word
then and now and shall be heard,
renew our Earth!

Advent liturgies, prayers and songs on the theme of peace

"Telling peace"some new resources for Advent on the theme of peace have just been posted to WCC website. This year the material was prepared in Asia. There is music to listen to and learn all available under creative commons license.
Included are liturgies for the four Sundays of Advent and worship outlines, prayers and ideas. The music is available in MP3 and pdf format.
You can also access last year's Imagine Peace material which was prepared in Latin America.

Advent conspiracy and noel no hell

Gilles Boucomont an ERF minister in Paris was behind the video clip Noël No Hell and is quoted as saying this about his expectations of the project:
Juste un peu de vérité et d’espérance en temps de crise et de mensonge... Entre le Père Noël et la "fête des lumières", entre la course aux courses et la sur-consommation, nous tentons de glisser le message de la pauvreté de l’Enfant-Roi (le vrai, lui) né dans l’étable de Bethléem.
(Just a bit of truth and hope at this time of crisis and lies ... between father Christmas and the different "light festivals", between racing to shop and over consumption, we're trying to slip in the message of the poverty of the infant king (the true one) born in the stable in Bethlehem.)
You can read an interview with him here and read the words to the songs on a Roman Catholic blog here and visit the clip's facebook page here and also read an article in Réforme here.

Si votre ordinateur peine, allez sur cette page

Clip Noël No Hell

envoyé par NoShame

Thanks to Maggi Dawn I've also been watching a video by Advent Conspiracy
who say this on their site:
The story of Christ's birth is a story of promise, hope, and a revolutionary love. So, what happened? What was once a time to celebrate the birth of a savior has somehow turned into a season of stress, traffic jams, and shopping lists.
And when it's all over, many of us are left with presents to return, looming debt that will take months to pay off, and this empty feeling of missed purpose. Is this what we really want out of Christmas?
What if Christmas became a world-changing event again?

I particularly like their focus on water, but the video messes up the frames on my blog so you'll just have to watch it here. Their slogan is "give presence".

Puzzling at life

I've posted to the docs section my short meditation from the advent service held on Wednesday evening. The service was based on the liturgies on peace that the WCC worship office has prepared for Advent, you can find them all here.
As part of our act of commitment everyone received one of the wordle cards with a jigsaw shaped piece cut out of it so that the peace wordle could show through.
Our lives are not so easy to resolve, sort out or live as jigsaw puzzles are. We are left not just puzzling but also perplexed. I have been wondering if Advent and Lent are not for me to some extent times to puzzle and be more perplexed. I try to find a missing piece but actually discover so much more that is missing, so many other pieces I want to search out and understand. As the celebration of the incarnation draws closer I hope I shall manage to put my Advent puzzling aside and receive the gift of the vulnerable child born also for me.

Here are some extracts from the meditation:

But we are of course still left with the puzzle
Around us here in the chapel you can see that words have not so much become flesh as taken on colour
On fragile paper in many languages, by the ordinary artists and poets that we are
We have painted the word peace in our own and other languages
We express something of our hope for the incarnation of God
Our hope for Christ the Prince of Peace
...
As we puzzle at the meaning of our own lives
And puzzle at daring to believe in peace
Perhaps this poetry and art which surrounds us this evening will also teach us generosity and practical solidarity
As we look forwards to the promise of the Word becoming flesh amongst us
And to swords across the world being beaten to ploughshares.

Postcards to another country

Looking at the lovely andere Zeiten site I came across these lovely cards which have the intriguing title in German Karten nach Anderland which can mean cards or maps to another country. they sound really lovely and are an ivitation to think in a different way while you're travelling, they include prayers and meditations as well as things to journal about and cards to send to friends while you're travelling to invite them to share your experience as you travel to another country.
It made me think of the World Social Forum's slogan - another world is possible.
Advent is about waiting for that very different country where Christ's kingdom will be born. It's also about trying to follow the map to that very different country. I think these cards are a lovely idea.
And remember um outro mundo é possível!