Be patient where you sit in the dark. The dawn is coming.
— Rumi from A Year With Rumi
I believe the world we want to inhabit is emerging — one life, one conversation, and one community at a time.
— Krista Tippett from The On Being Project
Hope begins in the dark: the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work. You don’t give up.
— Anne Lamott from Bird by Bird
All night my heart makes its way however it can over the rough ground of uncertainties, but only until night meets and then is overwhelmed by morning, the light deepening, the wind easing and just waiting, as I too wait (and when have I ever been disappointed?) for redbird to sing.
— Mary Oliver from A Thousand Mornings
Something Opens Our Wings
Some nights stay up till dawn.
As the moon sometimes does for the Sun.
Be a full bucket pulled up the dark way
of a well, then lifted out into light.
Something opens our wings.
Something makes boredom and hurt disappear.
Someone fills the cup in front of us.
We taste only sacredness.
— Rumi from A Year With Rumi
Psalm Of An Emerging Emmanuel
O Come O Come Emmanuel
I pray with upraised eyes.
Drop down, O Dew of Heaven,
that God might walk and talk on earth
might heal and feed our sin-soaked world.
O Come O Come Emmanuel
my prayers like searchlights
comb the starry winter skies.
Descend from the black hole of some neighboring galaxy
to green with your grace
our barren earth.
Such an Advent waiting prayer
can be a lifelong profession of patient longing
unless I know, with all my heart
that Emmanuel not only comes down
but also comes forth and emerges.
O Come O Come Emmanuel
come forth from deep within me
with Christmas luminous beauty.
For my heart has become the sacred crib,
the birthing place of God-among us.
Peace on earth and justice for all
will only become manifest in our lives
when enough of your sons and daughters
awaken to your divine design
that has made each of us
an emerging Emmanuel.
— Edward Hays from Prayers for a Plantetary Pilgrim: A Personal Manual for Prayer and Ritual
See Also:
- Guide to Advent
- Hope Nonetheless
- Journey from Darkness into Light
- Love Is Why We Have Hope
- Sweet Darkness
- The Light Is Returning
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