1st Advent
Luke 21: 25-36 (adapted by the author)
Revealing spiritual signs will appear in sun, moon and stars, signs that the spiritual world is again drawing near to humanity. On the earth, however, the peoples will be in distress, helpless before the rushing of the world ether sea, whose waves touch the earth. Human beings will lose the inner strength that is based only on the earthly, in fear and foreboding of everything that is coming over the earth.
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| Eye of God, Helix Nebula |
For even the world powers in the heavens will be shaken. Then, however, they will look upon the Son of Man, the future image of human beings, how He approaches out of the being of the clouds that surround the earth, how He comes in dynamic power, a power that is higher than anything that approaches human beings; how he comes in the shining of his God-imbued revelation. When this begins to happen, stand upright and raise your mind’s senses to the spirit.
For the hour of your liberation, free to experience the spirit world, is near.
And He spoke a parable: look at the fig tree and all the other trees. When they are in bud, you can see this and you yourself know that summer is near. Just so, when you see all this, shall you recognize the world transformative events through which the divine kingdom wants to open your inner being from now on, for the kingdom of God is approaching you.
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| Roland Tiller |
The truth I say to you: this humanity living today will not pass away before all this is fulfilled. Heaven and earth will perish; my words, however, will not perish.
Do not burden your hearts with excess in eating and drinking, so that your hearts do not fall prey to lethargy or intoxication. And beware of all unnecessary worries about your outer subsistence, so that the light of world-days does not come over you unprepared, like a choking snare. For it will come for all who live on the face of the whole earth. So at all times be of wakeful spirit in prayerful thought, so that you may find the strength to escape everything that is to happen, and may stand before the Son of Man.
1st Advent
December 1, 2018
Luke 21: 25-36
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| Buddha, Jan de Kok |
Although we are approaching the depth of midwinter, the gospel reading, oddly perhaps, speaks of the coming spring. It brings to our mind’s eye the image of the fig tree bursting into leaf. In Christ’s time, the fig tree was like the bodhi tree of enlightenment under which Buddha sat; it was the tree that represented a broader, enlightened awareness.
This reading, however, gives us the content of a higher awareness: the living Son of Man, radiant and powerful, coming toward us in the realm of the clouds, in the biosphere, the realm of life.
This year has been a year in which there have been shifts in awareness. There
are signs…signs that human beings are moving into an anxious awareness of the damage to the wholeness of the living earth; into a heart awareness that aches at the catastrophic treatment of other members of the human family. These are signs that the kingdom of God is arising in human hearts. The angels, full of hope, are watching closely.
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| Brian Jekel |
But, as the poet Denise Levertov says:
Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
…to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.*
