From Beliefnet.com:
Advent Prayer, Day 23: Prepare Ye the Way of the LordMonday December 21, 2009
Categories: Advent, Advent Prayer, Bible, Jesus, Prayer
By Claudia Mair Burney
Monday, the fourth week of Advent
"As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, "See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying in the wilderness; 'Prepare the way of the Lord, and make his paths straight." Mark 1:2-3 (NRSV)
It's hard to miss Christmas. Decorations are everywhere, holiday specials have pre-empted regular television programs, and countless messengers proclaim Jesus' birth through Christmas carols. "Joy to the world, the Lord is come!" But are we really getting the message? God himself has come among as, as one of us. To say his arrival is deeply personal is an understatement. The good news is that he wants to gift us with his presence in every area of our lives. Is his way into the whole of our existence cluttered with our garbage? God forbid! Now is the time to make his path to us straight. Can you hear the prophet's call from his wilderness into yours? Prepare the way of the Lord!
Oh Lord,
Look at the mess that is my life. I'm ashamed of all the barriers I create to block intimacy with you. Yet, you continue to come to me, mercifully moving my junk out of the way. But I have my own tasks to do. Your word admonishes me to work out my salvation with fear and trembling. Give me to strength to be faithful to you, and avoid the many occasions for sin presented to me. I want to be pure of heart, so before I even catch a glimpse of you, with great joy I can shout,
"Come, Lord Jesus."
Day Twenty-Three:
Peace on Earth
O come, desire of Nations, bind
In one the hearts of all mankind.
Bid thou our sad divisions cease
And be thyself our King of Peace.
In Luke's gospel, the coming of Jesus is immediately linked to peace when the angels sing their message to the shepherds. As a year plagued by violence draws to its close, people of faith are praying for the peace our world so desperately needs.
The Christmas Menorah
A small town supports a Jewish neighbor when her family faces prejudice during Hanukkah.
BY: Joan Wester Anderson
EmailShareDuring the wee hours of Sunday morning, December 8, 1996, after the third night of
Hanukkah
, someone took a baseball bat and broke the front window of a house on the street with a
lighted menorah
in the window, and the criminals reached through the shattered glass and smashed the menorah.
The menorah is used to celebrate the eight-day Jewish Festival of Lights, also known as Hanukkah, which occurs around the same time as
Christmas
. As a nativity scene reminds Christians of their heritage and faith, so does a menorah for Jews.
The woman who lived in the vandalized house was no stranger to prejudice. As a child, she had come with her mother, a Holocaust survivor, and her father, to the United States to escape persecution in the Soviet Union. Now, as she viewed the smashed menorah, the familiar fear returned.
Lisa Keeling, a young mother who lived down the street, heard about the incident on returning from mass with her family. She was appalled. Newtown has about fifteen hundred families, representing many cultures and religions. Lisa had never heard of anyone being singled out because of faith or ethnicity. How would she feel if someone desecrated a crèche on her lawn she wondered. Unless everyone were free to practice religious beliefs, no one could be free. Lisa had an idea. She said to her husband, "I'd like to put a menorah in our front window so that family will know they are not going through this alone. If the vandals come back, they'll have to target us, too. What do you think?
Lisa's husband didn't hesitate. "Go for it," he said.
Lisa soon ran into another neighbor, Margie Alexander, who had been as horrified as Lisa when she heard the news and was also eager to act.
Margie started driving from store to store, looking for menorahs, with Lisa calling all the likely sources and relaying the information to Margie on her car phone. Word got around, and several Christian neighbors dropped by, asking where to purchase a menorah. Margie and Lisa bought up all they could and distributed them just before sundown-time to light the next candle.
Then Lisa took down the Christmas lights in one of her windows and put the menorah there, all by itself. "I didn't want there to be any doubt about the statement we were making," she recalls.
That night, when the Jewish woman turned onto her street, she stopped in amazement. Greeting her was a sea of orange menorah lights, shining in silent solidarity from the windows of all eighteen Christian households on her block. Blinking back tears, she went home, replaced the broken bulbs in her own menorah and put it back in the window.
Margie and Lisa are hanging menorahs again this Christmas. "it's become the most cherished part of my Christmas," Margie says, "and it's taught me a wonderful lesson: Just one little step in the right direction can make life better for everyone."
EmailShareCopyright 1997 by Joan Wester Anderson. Used with permission from the author. From Angels We Have Heard on High.' For more stories of God's love, visit Joan's website at: www.joanwanderson.com.
How to Live Nonviolently
To create peace in our lives--and our world--we need to be able to sit with frustration and hold the tension of opposite views.
BY: Parker J. Palmer
EmailShareViolence of every shape and form has its roots in the divided life, in that fault line within us that cracks open and becomes a divide
between
us. But violence is often more than intra- and interpersonal. just as the physical violence called war requires massive institutional support, so most forms of nonphysical violence are backed by institutional arrangements that allow it and even encourage it.
From colleges that treat win-lose competition as the best way to make students learn to medical schools that turn suffering patients into abstract "objects" of study to religious institutions built on the idea that they alone know the mind of God to economic institutions that put the rights of capital ahead of the rights of people to political institutions premised on the notion that might makes right to cultural institutions that give superiority to people of one race or gender--in all these ways, and more, violence is woven into the very fabric of our collective existence.
The bad news is that violence is found at every level of our lives. The good news is that we can choose nonviolence at every level as well. But what does it mean, in specifics, to act nonviolently? The answer depends on the situation, of course, and a thousand situations might yield a thousand answers. Yet running through all of these answers we will find a single "habit of the heart": to be in the world nonviolently means learning to hold the tension of opposites, trusting that the tension itself will pull our hearts and minds open to a third way of thinking and acting.
In particular, we must learn to hold the tension between the reality of the moment and the possibility that something better might emerge. In a business meeting, for example, I mean the tension between the fact that we are deadlocked about what to do and the possibility that we might find a solution superior to any of those on the table. In a post-September 11 world, I mean the tension between the fact that we are engaged in the endless cycle of war and the possibility that we might someday live in a world at peace.
Of course, finding a third way beyond our current dilemma may be possible in theory, but it often seems unlikely in life. In a contentious business meeting, a better solution may well exist, but the pressures of ego, time, and the bottom line make it unlikely that we will find it. In a world at war, peace may be our dream, but the grim realities of greed, fear, hatred, and doomsday weaponry quickly turn that dream into a delusion.
The insight at the heart of nonviolence is that we live in a tragic gap-a gap between the way things are and the way we know they might be. It is a gap that never has been and never will be closed. If we want to live nonviolent lives, we must learn to stand in the tragic gap, faithfully holding the tension between reality and possibility.
I harbor no illusions about how hard it is to live that way. Though I aspire to be one of those life-giving people who keeps a grip on both reality and hope, I often find that tension too hard to hold--so I let go of one pole and collapse into the other. Sometimes I resign myself to things as they are, sinking into a life of cynical disengagement. Sometimes I embrace a dreamy idealism, living a life of cheerful irresponsibility that floats above the fray.
Deep within me there is an instinct even more primitive than "fight or flight," and I do not think it is mine alone. As a species, we are profoundly impatient with tensions of any sort, and we want to resolve every one of them as quickly as we can.
For example, we are in a meeting where a decision must be made. As we talk, it becomes clear that people disagree on the matter, and our frustration grows as we listen to various options. Uncomfortable with holding the tension of conflicting viewpoints and wanting to "get on with it," we call the question, take a vote, and let the majority decide what course we should take.
The tension has been resolved, or so it appears. But by cutting the exploration short, we have deprived ourselves of a chance to find a better way by allowing opposing ideas to enrich and enlarge each other until a new vision emerges. And by letting the majority decide which way we should go, we often drive the tension underground, creating an embittered minority who devote themselves to undermining the decision we thought we had made.
Sometimes our instinct to resolve tension quickly is played out on a much larger stage. When it became clear what had happened on September 11, 2001, the people of the United States were caught in a tension between the violence that had been done to us and what we would do in response. Of course, the outcome was never in doubt. We would respond by wreaking violence on the perpetrators--or on stand-ins who could be made to look like the perpetrators--because that is what nation-states do.
But we had an alternative: we might have held that tension longer, allowing it to open us to a more life-giving response. If we had done so, we might have begun to understand that the terror Americans felt on September 11 is the daily fare of a great many people around the world. That insight might have deepened our capacity for global empathy. That empathy might have helped us become more compassionate and responsible citizens of the international community, altering some of our national policies and practices that contribute to the terror felt daily by people in distant lands. And those actions might have made the world a safer place for everyone, including us. Had we held the tension longer, we might have been opened to the kinds of actions proposed by William Sloane Coffin --actions that place us in the gap between reality and possibility:
We will respond, but not in kind. We will not seek to avenge the death of innocent Americans by the death of innocent victims elsewhere, lest we become what we abhor. We refuse to ratchet up the cycle of violence that brings only ever more death, destruction, and deprivation. What we will do is build coalitions with other nations. We will share intelligence, freeze assets, and engage in forceful extradition of terrorists if internationally sanctioned. [We will] do all in [our] power to see justice done, but by the force of law only, never the law of force.
Instead of holding the tension and being pulled open to options such as these, we allowed ourselves to be caught on the horns of the "fight or flight" dilemma. Since "Americans never turn tail," we fought and, as of this writing, are still fighting. But we do not feel any safer today than we did on September 12, 2001. We have simply acquiesced to fear.
Read more: http://www.beliefnet.com/Inspiration/2004/10/How-To-Live-Nonviolently.aspx?p=2#ixzz18hh74kX1
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