Miracles Abound When We Keep Watch
A few years ago, I spent several weeks during Advent with the Benedictine sisters of Mount St. Scholastica in Atchison, Kansas. We listened to Scripture readings full of amazing happenings: surprise pregnancies, angelic messages, signs of peace and glimmers of light in the darkest days of the year. .
It’s tempting, in fact all too easy, to think of these events as happening only in Bible stories, or to people in a distant, more magical past. The truth is, we live in a world awash in wonder. Miracles are right in front of us.
We merely have to look at images beamed back to us from deep space by the Hubble Space Telescope. They confirm what scientists have long surmised: we live on just one small piece of real estate within a hundred billion galaxies.
Within each of those galaxies are an estimated one hundred billion stars.
Is it not truly a wonder, a miracle then, that we have come to exist at all? You might say we purchased a ticket in an amazing cosmic lottery and we all won!
And not only that. The stars we see in the night sky contain carbon, hydrogen, helium, oxygen, iron, and nitrogen — the very chemical building blocks we carry in our bodies today. We who are alive today are forged from the material of stars conceived billions and billions of years ago, passed on to us in a continuous chain of life.
When we touch our face, we are touching the stars. When walk on the earth, we are walking on the stuff of stars.
As if to drive home my point, the night sky is about to put on a grand show. On Monday, as the first week of Advent begins, we’ll see not only the final full moon before the Winter Solstice, but a partial lunar eclipse in the early morning hours.
Mighty Jupiter and ringed Saturn have been blazing in the night sky for months now. Between December 17 and 21, they will appear to gradually shift closer to each other, as if they are twin stars.
It’s a sight that won’t come around again 2080, so don’t miss it this time. As Jesus urges us in the gospel reading for the first Sunday in Advent, “Be watchful! Stay awake!”
It’s tempting to complain about what can’t do and what we’ll miss this holiday season because of the strictures placed on us by the pandemic. In reality, we have a chance to make this Advent one of our most memorable.
The Advent angel stories, for instance, invite us to think of the everyday “angels” we encounter — the people who appear just when we seem to need them.
For me, those “angels” include my Tibetan meditation teacher, Lama Tsering Ngodup Yadsampa; the poet Lisa Breger, whose words inspire me; my Zumba fitness instructor, Lucy Croft, who challenges me; my friend Dianne Clemmons with whom I exchange a daily three-line poem; my social media mentor Jodie Slothower; my spiritual director Sister Emily Meisel; poet and photographer Pat Leyko Connelly, with whom I often collaborate.
My list of angels is endless.
Another unexpected wonder of this pandemic time is the number of fantastic people from across the country I’ve encountered on the online retreats I guide through the miracle of Zoom — people I likely never would have met otherwise. They teach me so much.
In a Thanksgiving Day op-ed piece published in The New York Times, Pope Francis invites us to emulate the doctors, nurses and hospital staff who give so selflessly of themselves. He calls them “the saints next door,” who have awakened “something important in our hearts.”
In the coming weeks we will read in the Book of Isaiah, “A people who dwelt in darkness have received a great light.” Theologian Bonnie Thurston writes something similar in an essay called “The Sacrament of Advent.”
Thurston says Advent isn’t merely the remembrance of long-ago events. Advent is on-going. It goes on because we are called to be bearers of Christ in our own times.
In this Advent season, may we give thanks for the angels and miracles around us. May we listen to the soft voice within calling us to be bearers of light.
May we awaken to “something important” in our own hearts and carry that light into the hearts of others.
(Many thanks to Matilde Pinto of Arlington, VA who shared with me the photograph of the Peace Post on the grounds of St. Benedict Monastery in Bristow, VA that accompanies today’s column).
