Advent Meditation: Love, Control & Hope

Bible Lesson: I Thessalonians 3:9-13

“May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all.” (Excerpt)

Advent is my favorite season in the church calendar and the first Sunday the day of my deepest, most profound feelings. Even when I was a child, this season was always a wonderful time for me, filled with hope, expectation, love and excitement. Anticipation has always been one of the key emotions of this season, looking forward to Christ’s second coming as well as His first.

However, as the last sentence above implies, Advent has its dark side. The Bible often speaks of the second coming of our Lord as a time filled with joy, but also with judgment and terrors. During Advent the church reads many such scriptures and preaches sermons encompassing both mercy and judgment. So we have hope on one side and apocalypse on the other. What could possibly bind these opposites together?

The answer of course is Christ’s love. This love, called “agape” in the New Testament, is infinitely purer than the selfish love that we can summon within ourselves. Mere human love breeds the desire for control, and sadly, control is the destroyer of love. Often our own tiny love contains the seeds of its destruction, as well as hurting the ones we say we love. Christ’s love comes to set us free, to liberate us from the need for control that consumes so much of our lives.

I remember a time, when I was a child, when I caught my first frog. I put it in a large jar with leaves, sticks, insects, and so on, hoping to create an environment it would like. At the same time, I could watch it, have it close, and keep it “under my thumb” so to speak. Of course, I punched holes in the lid of the jar for air, and gave the small animal plenty of water. Presto! I was proud of my first living terrarium.

My pride lasted for only a day. The next morning, I pulled out my jar, and the frog was dead. Sadly, I took the jar outside, emptied the pitiful contents into a small hole and buried it. Yes, I did control the frog for a time, but it simply could not live under such constrictions. My terrarium was really a prison for the little thing. Without freedom, it soon died.

So does our own control-seeking love threaten to wreck the lives of our loved ones and finally ourselves. Our one hope to escape this terrible cycle of love and its destruction is to enliven ourselves with the pure love of Jesus. Such love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things,” according to St. Paul in I Corinthians 13. This love never ends. It is our eternal hope.

Yes, the Bible speaks of a Christ who will come on the Last Day to liberate us and a world filled with sin and selfishness. This is our abiding faith. Also, He can come into our hearts daily, provided we let Him, Here and now, Jesus can free us from controlling love that only destroys. Just as the Bible speaks of a Last Day that brings the annihilation of the old, so we must allow the crucifixion of our own selfish love. In doing this, we can experience Christ’s real love within ourselves and for others. So the darkness of Advent can become the light and hope of Jesus’ perfect love.

Here is an eternal, immutable law of God and the cosmos: Before something truly new can come into this world, the old must pass away. During Advent, let us remember a dark and mournful world over 2000 years ago, and time that waited for Jesus and His love. Such were the days of the ancient Hebrew prophets who foretold the coming of a Messiah.

However, when Christ was born, lived and resurrected, that old world died. May our own small-hearted and control-obsessed love die as well. Dear God, help us grasp the opportunities we have each day to show Jesus’ selfless love to all around us in a world of direst suffering and need.

Finding a Way

I lay in bed that night,
watching auto headlights
flicker on a wall.
I thought,
Could you be mine?

Sounds of freeway-hardened, speeding
truckmen echoed in from midnight.
Wildcat calls that crossed the city
prowled through my darkened room.
Will you care?
I thought.
My heart beat fast
from wondering where that path
would lead.

I began in sunny morning
on a prairie highway.
Mountains rose,
bare monuments reminding me
of Titans’ battles
fought to the death
in the ancient days.
Sentinels of a gone forever
cast down here,
as quiet guards
on watch above me.
They lined a dim, heat-gray horizon,
with each scraped-down rockface
rising.
Reaching cliffs seemed to try and catch
whatever moisture
that might fall
still
from a blue-white dusty sky.

Will you see
and freely take
or turn
away?

Soon I found you
at the desert’s edge
by a place of sand and sagebrush haven.
You bore me off to show
a vast arroyo
panorama
to my eager eyes.
There a river chorus
sounded and fell
through a wind-rock whited well
in a canyon gorge.
This place where mountain split in twain
to baptize plain and city
enfolded us
within its shadow.
We stopped to rest
by water’s edge.

What will be
your answer?
Could you ever
stoop to take my
hand
in yours?

So there, amid the waters’ glittering wonders
I bestowed my words,
while foam and breeze
rushed wild
over nearby boulders.
The airy sunglare hung there lazy
over white-rapids’ restless
hazy motion.
Mayflies flew about our heads
like children at their noontime play
of leapfrog games,
in free abandon.

Strange, my words
I don’t remember,
but even now
I know.
I told you of my
wish.

As I watched the river’s
bright reflected lights
dance
in your eyes,
I knew.
That day we would begin
a joyful journey
ever hoping, seeking, talking,
becoming one.

Communion

My loved one, your face greets me in the morning
from silent pillowed mooring
of soft, unharried sleep.
You’re unaware
of slatted light that seeps still inward,
to invade the quiet room
as mist steals in from rising tides
toward Big Sur’s mythic coastline.
Careless dust motes dance
like a thousand daylight fireflies
above your unfurled form.

I pray,
“Dear God, be ever with you.
Guard your soul and reveal
to you
the proud iron-girdered strength
of my love,
unbounded as the stars.”

You stretch, dozing cat-like,
with generous yawn and akimbo arms, thrust legs
that force bunched breasts and muscles to awake.
Your back unfolds like slow unrolling furrows
of wave-corrugated waters.
They flex like ocean ripples seen
through a soft sun-haloed fog
as water washes up on craggy boulders.
Your skin’s like that,
and yet so soft, inviting.
The tightened flesh pulled down across full
buttocks now swells out
and pushes upward
to receive.

A single hand spans intimate space
between us
to explore the meadow freshness
of my unmown, rounded chest
with nipples tight and hardened
as acorns.
You scratch and rub each hair
until I almost feel the fire sparks
flying as if tossed
from a welder’s workbench.
Or is it strength of my flowing
heartbeat’s constant pressure,
pushed into my legs’ conjoining,
that fulfills the pillar
of my desire?

Like a careful sculptor, you move hands
slow-working,
down the center-tuft of hair,
on my belly
carpeted
as if by tree moss.
Like a restless tide, you overthrow me
and grasp my upthrust limb
to straddle me entire.
I probe the surrounding wet-warmth
of your wide-spread now lower caverns,
so soft as dewy grass at sunrise.
Then I push
with thunderbolted fury

Well-Spring

People were milling, spilling river-like
around each other
under sun-borne haze.
They bought and sold;
young and old rushed
everywhere
under depths of blue spread overhead.
They were a maze,
heedless of the day-stream’s flowing reservoir of brightness.
The rushing, close-together wanderers
found nothing to amaze them.

Filling streets,
Crowds were waters coursing over and around a dam,
failing to meet or come together.
Separate flows rushed off,
cascading about
in different directions.

Yet two streams
found each other in the flood
Of aimless nomads.

I drank deep from you,
as if from some rare, ancient tribal well,
before you went away.
I rested in stillness
at that sacred shrine,
a pool, formed from rock-born cooling springs.
My soul became
arrested,
moved and yet unmoving.

In that place,
I heard
your voice.

Embrace

At dawn, I took your arms
and covered you – embraced –
as yellow wildflowers, sweet,
caress the hills in spring.
Our touching bloomed and danced,
rustling against me,
brushing my breast
like unseen breezes.

I held you to my heart.
It beat, while I listened to your breath
come in quiet rhythm between us,
a music given
for one another.

If only this stillness,
a soft-grasped time
could last yet longer
than only a tiny, rushing moment.
For now, I hold enough
to fill an ocean,
resting glassy calm
at windless sunset.

Let me bear you up
through all my mornings
of a thousand million promises
and their tomorrows.
I’ve watched for, wanted,
with such leaping restless
seeking, now feeling
this trace of light
upon your face.

Closed, your eyes yet
sleep as death
but still I get
your warmth about me.
Rise to morn,
my precious one
and be the day
for me.

As the skylark,
songful greets the risen sun,
I offer all I have, or am,
or will be
always
to you.

Far Away

You’ve opened for me vistas of peace
like a mountain valley across a quiet glacial lake.
I take of your heart such color
as a tapestry spread large across an ocean,
tranquil enough at best
to be called Pacific.

With You

Your softest touch,
the close entwining cradle
of your sleep-entrusted limbs,
wrap around me
in full-tight embrace.
You hold me close
through untold hours together.
Yet I know this time must fade
like mists of morning air,
warmed with day’s renascence,
damp to touch.
Soon it’s driven off
by sunlight’s harshest glare
and never seen again.

Still, in your face I glimpse
such spirit,
that I know some mystery must
bind us both
and keep us safely close
for time and now, and yet another time.
Your breath on me
in aftermath of sleep together
exhales the only rhythmic sound
to break the cathedral quiet
of this place.
I feel as if awaking to some far-off
mountain sunrise
over mythic lands of unicorns and questing knights
I dreamed of as a child.

We embrace in still devotion here,
like holy martyrs’ prayers,
to live each sacred moment
on our pilgrim way
as both for one.

So our tiny raft
will bear us forward
on life’s rough-surging rapid waters.
Where?
We journey fast through wind-torn
mountain passes,
to the rock-held, highest places,
over darkest seas.
For how long?

I’ll never care
as long as we remain
transfixed
in one another’s arms like this.
I’d rather give away
the riches of a hundred thousand
passing nations,
than lose the peace I feel each day
with you.

Two Forged

I have your secret name
inscribed within.
It lies where none can see save me
like a cherished anniversary engraved
on the hidden side
of a golden ring.
It’s in a place far taken, way beyond
any space human minds
may inhabit, see, or know.

I’ve shaped you there and wake
in mornings with that name
whispered reverent-silenced by my lips.
Falling asleep, the cant of it
resounds in darkness round my room.
In noonday quiet, I hear its sound
as if prayer-chanted
by holy wise men thralling sleep
for ancient serpent dragons
in their lair.

Mystery is the name
of this unknown sure enchantment,
old as untold human time.
The puzzle remains,
how two precious-made metals fired together
in some divine-created foundry
flow into one.
Sparks scatter-spray under hammers
of giants who meld
alloyed hearts together.

Crafted in fiery forges and pounding,
heat strives with cold
as annealed gold emerges,
now initialed.
In steam-sizzling flames of furnace and ash,
a new ring stronger than before
enters grave blackness.
Then flowing blindly upward,
its circle seizes
the light.