Today is the first of advent, this year, in leading up to Christmas, I am going to take a moment every day to share a reflection and a thought.
I hope it brings you, the reader, joy and hope and peace and love – virtues and values we celebrate in this season, and hopefully participate in sharing with the world.
This weekend, over the Thanksgiving Holiday, I am remembering my mother who passed very unexpectedly four years ago, her passing left us in a wake of her life revealed its waves have yet ceased from crashing into our lives at most unexpected times.
This poem by Mary Oliver, who writes like a prophetess in my life, reminds and admonishes me to trust in the one thing that will carry us all through – “love …. deeply and without patience” – gratitude as an act of rebellion against that which is fleeting and stolen from us, letting God and the word know that ‘I’ am grateful. The gift has been given and received.
In the American ecosystem we celebrate Thanksgiving and roll right into Christmas, growing up we did not have this transition from gratitude into the Christmas Holiday, and if we’re sincere we can recognize that it’s increasingly challenging to focus on gratitude and the anticipation of the joy of Christmas.
It’s easy to forget yourself in the reverberations of the noisy world we live in. What we engage in makes its way into our bodies and souls where it creates more noise.
In remembering my mother, and slowing down with my girls and loved ones here in America, I am reminded that what it most important to me is to walk on this path with such grace and dignity that it is unmistakable to me that in the end I have lived deeply and without patience.
