Daily Advent Devotional: Day 21 – Sat, Dec 19
Joy may be encouraged and reinforced by your choice of environments. Opt to connect with nature. Or to change perspectives by going somewhere other than your usual setting.
How you set the stage for where you work and play permits you to access joy. Being in places that minimize interruptions and offer immediate inspiration may support your reach for the joy within. Often joy in our sacred texts is described in connection with hills and rivers, gardens and vineyards and fields. Or in sacred places such as human-made sanctuaries or holy mountaintops. Be intentional about your choice of environment, even in small ways: pay attention to the lighting, orderliness, or perhaps the view. — Rev Gail
Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing! For the Lord has comforted his people, and will have compassion on his suffering ones. — Isaiah 49:13
For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. — Isaiah 55:12
To lust for joy is to lust for the God of life. To make joy where at first it seems there is none is to become co-creator with the God of life. When we make joy, we make a holier, happier life. — Joan Chittister
For Equilibrium, a Blessing — John O’Donohue
Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.
As the wind loves to call things to dance,
May your gravity by lightened by grace.
Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,
May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.
As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become.
As silence smiles on the other side of what’s said,
May your sense of irony bring perspective.
As time remains free of all that it frames,
May your mind stay clear of all it names.
May your prayer of listening deepen enough
to hear in the depths the laughter of god.
Advent Daily Devotional: Day 14
Sat, Dec 12 – DAY 14
World peace has other connotations. It can mean harmonious, responsible connection with Creation. It may apply to how we engage the natural world in which we live.
Do we actively tend to the needs of the environment in which we live? Do we find out what is out of balance in the places around us, and help to restore equilibrium where we can? Do we regularly make sustainable, equitable choices as consumers and advocates, as people who relish the outdoors in play and work? Who reside here so that we can be close to this breathtaking world?
Peace may arise from communing with the natural and sacred places around us. Yet our peaceful connection to the environment also implies reciprocity and stewardship, a holy commitment to care for the world in which we live, as mandated by our own creation stories in Genesis. — Rev Gail
For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. — Isaiah 55:12
When I say it’s you I like, I’m talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed. ― Fred Rogers
The Peace of Wild Things — Wendell Barry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.