by Christie Purifoy | Dec 23, 2013 | Advent, Jesus, Poetry, Uncategorized
I may have saved the best for last.
I never speak in absolutes about favorite books or poems or writers, but I think Luci Shaw’s “Made Flesh” is my favorite poem for Advent.
Of course, I’ve mentioned Luci Shaw a few times before. Advent may be pouring itself out into the glory of the Christmas season, but Shaw’s poetry is an excellent literary companion through the whole year. Might I suggest beginning the new year with her poems close at hand?
This one is worth reading slowly.
And repeatedly.
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Made Flesh
After
the white-hot beam of annunciation
fused heaven with dark earth,
his searing, sharply focused light
went out for a while,
eclipsed in amniotic gloom:
his cool immensity of splendor,
his universal grace,
small-folded in a warm, dim
female space –
the Word stern-sentenced to be
nine months’ dumb –
infinity walled in a womb,
until the next enormity –
the Mighty One, after submission
to a woman’s pains,
helpless on a barn’s bare floor,
first-tasting bitter earth.
Now
I in him surrender
to the crush and cry of birth.
Because eternity
was closeted in time,
he is my open door to forever.
From his imprisonment
my freedoms grow,
find wings. Part of his body,
I transcend this flesh.
From his sweet silence my mouth sings.
Out of his dark I glow.
My life, as his,
slips through death’s mesh,
time’s bars,
joins hands with heaven,
speaks with stars.
– Luci Shaw, from Accompanied by Angels
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 22, 2013 | Advent, prayer, Uncategorized
A prayer for this, the fourth Sunday of Advent:
In the dark of the year
I will light a candle …
for Christmas coming soon …
for Jesus born in Bethlehem …
for the angels’ message of peace and goodwill …
for the star that leads us all to Jesus …
May the light of my Christmas candle remind me of heaven’s light.
– from A Child’s First Book of Prayers, by Lois Rock and Alison Jay
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by Christie Purifoy | Dec 21, 2013 | Advent, Books, children, Uncategorized
I finished the Christmas grocery shopping today.
That means I have nothing to do for days but read and read and read by the tree. Well, that and wrap presents. I do tend to put that chore off till the last possible minute. And, I suppose the children will still demand to be fed. Strange how they expect regular meals even while on holiday.
But, still, rest assured, there will be a great deal of reading in the days ahead. I hope that proves true for you as well.
Here are a few more favorites from our stack of Christmas stories.
(You can find all my book recommendations here along with a disclaimer about the affiliate links I use.)
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Today, I’m recommending three picture books, but wait … these books aren’t really meant for small children. My second-grader and fourth-grader enjoy these, but I would share these books with anyone from an older child to an adult.
This first book would make an especially nice gift for a poetry or art-lover.
It is Robert Frost’s Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
with gorgeous illustrations by Susan Jeffers.
With its intricately detailed illustrations of snowy landscapes, this is a book that demands we slow down. My children love to search out the forest animals hidden in each image, and Jeffers gives this familiar poem a lovely, new twist of an ending through her designs.
But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep
Christmas Day in the Morning
was originally published by Pearl Buck in 1955. This picture-book version features full-color artwork by Mark Buehner.
If you don’t know the story already, I won’t spoil the surprise. I’ll only say that this one inspired my daughter to shovel the driveway as a Christmas gift to her Dad.
Buck’s classic story always makes me tear up a little. Okay, I have trouble not breaking down whenever I read it out loud.
The best Christmas gift I ever had, and I’ll remember it, son, every year on Christmas morning, so long as I live.
Winter’s Gift
is another sentimental favorite (but what’s Christmas without a little sentimentality?). It is written and illustrated by Jane Monroe Donovan and tells the story of an old man spending his first Christmas alone. He is without hope until a horse, lost in the woods, brings with her a very special gift.
‘The star is the most important part of the tree,’ she would always say. ‘It’s a symbol of hope, and no matter how bad things get, you should always have hope.’
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 20, 2013 | Advent, children, God's Love, grief, Jesus, Uncategorized
Before I began writing these Advent reflections, I had a very general structure in mind. The whole series would move, I thought, from dark to light, from ordinary to extraordinary, from dust and dirt to starlight.
Oh, the best laid plans.
Instead, I have consulted this writing plan each morning and discovered my own emptiness. No words. No stories. No ideas. Which is a desperate place and a very good place to find oneself. It has led me to frantic prayer and constant listening. Finding no stories in the plan, I have listened hard for any hint of story in my day.
Often, I have found my stories in my daughter’s difficult observations.
Yesterday, she said, “I think it must be the worst thing in the world to have a child who dies.”
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I am a writer, and I abhor a platitude. An easy answer. The cliché we use to bypass actual thought. Even so, it can be tempting to fall back on those things when we are faced with the unanswerable and the terrible. But I have learned a few things from writing and from reading, and I have learned a few things mothering this daughter.
I fight the pull of the pretty, easy answer and say nothing but “Yes, yes, I know.”
She is only ten, but she already understands love’s terrible shadow. She knows intuitively, without ever being taught, that great love rips us open. Leaves us wounded and bleeding.
I have no good answers for these kinds of questions. I have no band-aid for this degree of pain. Today, I do not even have much of a story. And the writing plan? Well, that has been entirely abandoned. Sometimes, the world looks darker and more ordinary the closer we get to Christmas. Sometimes, there is no perfect, timely trajectory from Advent waiting to Christmas fulfillment.
But if I have no story, I do have this one thing to share with you. A vision of sorts.
After our conversation, I kept seeing a picture in my mind. It was my daughter, so full of difficult questions and a grief too old for her years, and she was wearing her angel costume. It is white and shimmery, and the padded, embroidered wings are gold.
I kept seeing her sad eyes against the white glow of the angel’s dress, and I realized, I think for the first time, how much our Christmas gift was heaven’s loss.
I realized how vast an emptiness the Prince of Heaven left behind him when he poured himself into Mary’s womb.
I looked into angel eyes, and they seemed to say, “We have lost him. We have said goodbye. How long till he returns to us?”
I can’t erase love’s dark shadow, and I’m not sure I would if I could. But I know that the parent heart of God has known it all already. I know he has passed by a heavenly chamber and found it empty. Heart-breakingly empty. And I know he suffered that pain for love.
And yet, the emptiness of heaven at the moment of incarnation is as much good news as the emptiness of the tomb.
This is the good news of God-with-us. This is the good news of our restoration.
This is the comfort of believing God sees our emptiness, our pain and says, “Yes, yes, I know.”
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 19, 2013 | Advent, Food, Music, Uncategorized
People, look east!
The guest is on the way …
A hymn for this, the third Thursday of Advent.
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“People, Look East”
People, look east. The time is near
Of the crowning of the year.
Make your house fair as you are able,
Trim the hearth and set the table.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the Guest is on the way.
Furrows, be glad. Though earth is bare,
One more seed is planted there.
Give up your strength the seed to nourish,
That in course the flower may flourish.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the Rose is on the way.
Birds, though you long have ceased to build,
Guard the nest that must be filled.
Even the hour when wings are frozen
God for fledging time has chosen.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the bird, is on the way.
Stars, keep the watch. When night is dim,
One more light the bowl shall brim,
Shining beyond the frosty weather,
Bright as the sun and moon together.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the Star, is on the way.
Angels announce with shouts of mirth,
Him who brings new life to earth.
Set every peak and valley humming
With the word, the Lord is coming
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the Lord, is on the way.
Words: Eleanor Farjeon, 1928
Music: ‘Besançon’, traditional French carol
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 18, 2013 | Advent, children, Family, Grace, Scripture, Uncategorized
There is Advent on this blog. And there is Advent in my home.
Advent on the blog is, I like to think, serene. Advent at home? Less so.
Here is a confession: I have everything it takes to be a good mother. Unfortunately, those qualities consistently abandon me during the tired edges of the day. Which means I only have what it takes when ¾ of my children are at school, and the last little quarter is asleep in her crib.
Translation: I do not have what it takes.
So far, our family Advent observance has been … impressive. At least, I’ve been impressed. Most nights we have sat down together to light candles and read a devotion. I can’t take the credit. The whole thing is due entirely to the friend (angel, really) who gave us a complete Jesse Tree collection the first Sunday of Advent. We had everything handed to us: beautifully crafted ornaments for each day, a printout of Ann Voskamp’s family devotional (tied up in green silk ribbon), even a large glass vase. We supplied a bare branch from our yard, and we were in business.
But the wait for Christmas is long and heavy, and our observance has cracked a bit around the edges. Well, worse than that, really. I may have exploded one recent evening after yet another argument over who would hang the ornament. I may have called the whole thing off and sent them to bed. One of them crying those enormous, guilt-inducing crocodile tears.
And yet, Monday night somehow found us gathered, again, around our Jesse tree. I wasn’t optimistic. I was tired. When I glimpsed the evening’s reading – 2 ½ pages from the book of I Kings?! From an obscure story about idol worship?! – I panicked.
I was this close to shutting the book up again and announcing a change of plans. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t read the whole thing while children fought and pestered me with questions like Who is Baal? What is a prophet? They did what to the animals??
But a fight over who was or was not touching someone’s favorite ornament on the tree threatened to boil over so I did the only thing I could.
I started reading.
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Do you know the story?
There is a showdown between Elijah and the prophets of Baal. Baal’s followers prepare an altar and a sacrifice. Then they spend hours calling on their god to set the thing on fire. They shout. They dance. They prophesy franticly. They even slash themselves until the blood flows.
Here is the eloquence of Scripture: “But there was no response, no one answered, no one paid attention.”
At this point in the reading, I had the full attention of my children. They sat mesmerized. It was as if we could see that frantic, bloody dancing. It was as if we could hear the deafening silence of heaven.
I kept reading.
Elijah sets up the stones and the wood for his own altar. He douses it in water. And more water. There is so much water, and the impossibility is doubled. Tripled.
Elijah prays: “Answer me, Lord, answer me, so these people will know that you, Lord, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again.”
We sat – each of us – with eyes large and breath caught – until: the God of Fire came.
He heard. He came. And there was fire.
“The Lord – he is God! The Lord – he is God!”
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Making space for God’s presence in my home feels about as back-breaking as hauling stones. My husband and I stack those stones while little people bicker around our ankles. Too often, their bickering is contagious.
I lose my temper. I can’t take even one more thing. Not one more mess. Not one more argument. Until, I have filled our home, our altar of stones, with so much water. An impossible flood of water.
Making space for God’s presence in my home is also a free gift. It is a beautiful and complete family advent collection handed to me by a friend.
It asks nothing of me. Requires nothing of me.
It is an impossible mess, and it is grace, and my children and I have seen fire.
Because God came.
Because God always will come.
