the self-giving of more being than you can comprehend

By Lindsey Brigham (in a blog post here):

The disproportion between preparation and presentation dislodges our priorities to sharpen our dulled values. Our cultural context presses us to prioritize the moment of satisfaction and to scorn the time of waiting. We celebrate Christmas without Advent and wish for instant Thanksgiving dinner.

…The depth of our appreciation for any expression of beauty … is always disproportionate to the labor pressed into its making. Which work of art, even one that you have studied deeply and been shaped by profoundly, have you contemplated with the attentiveness or time poured into its creation? How long do the lovely wildflowers take to germinate, sprout, grow, and blossom before you deign to give them a second’s appreciation while zipping down the interstate? The [star] light that you only rarely even notice … how many years or lifetimes does it travel through galaxies to rest for one brief instant upon your eyes?

I do not think this disproportion originates from our fallenness, but our finitude; we simply have not the capacity for awe proportionate to all the wonders amongst which we live and move and have being. Wonder itself, perhaps, is the consciousness of the disproportion.

…Here, perhaps, we get to the heart of the vision and the mystery, as the table is the heart of human life. Every table images an altar set with sacrifice, for it is by sacrificial death that we live. Yet for how many minutes in any day do you contemplate the daily deaths of plant and animal which sustain the life of your body, the deaths-to-self of your neighbors and family that sustain the life of your spirit—the death of the immortal, eternal, infinite Son of God to sustain the life of your soul? Each moment of your living, each object of your experience, represents the self-giving of more being than you can comprehend.

Brewed from decades of agony

Poem by by Emily Dickinson.

THE RETURN.

Though I get home how late, how late!
So I get home, ‘t will compensate.
Better will be the ecstasy
That they have done expecting me,
When, night descending, dumb and dark,
They hear my unexpected knock.
Transporting must the moment be,
Brewed from decades of agony!

To think just how the fire will burn,
Just how long-cheated eyes will turn
To wonder what myself will say,
And what itself will say to me,
Beguiles the centuries of way!

the austere blessedness of waiting

Celebrating Advent means being able to wait. Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break open the ripe fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot. But all too often the greedy eyes are only deceived; the fruit that seemed so precious is still green on the inside, and disrespectful hands ungratefully toss aside what has so disappointed them.

Whoever does not know how the austere blessedness of waiting–that is, of hopefully doing without–will never experience the full blessing of fulfillment.

In a prison letter from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to his fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer, December 13, 1943. (From page 4 of God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas from the writings of Bonhoeffer, translated by O.C. Dean Jr. and edited by Jana Riess.)

planting still other seeds

The person … who looks for quick results in the seed planting of well-doing will be disappointed. If I want potatoes for dinner tomorrow, it will do me little good to go out and plant potatoes in my garden tonight. There are long stretches of darkness and invisibility and silence that separate planting and reaping. During the stretches of waiting there is cultivating and weeding and nurturing and planting still other seeds.

By Eugene H. Peterson from an interview with Rodney Clapp published in a forward to Peterson’s book, The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction (under the heading Traveling Light).