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DEcember 2025 | Advent & Christmas: Hope and Incarnation

Spiritual Autobiography
Ministry Call
Resumé

Other Materials:
Church Service
Writing
Creative Pilgrimage
Book of Exodus

Jesus and the Disinherited
by Howard Thurman
Read for free on Internet Archive

Braiding Sweetgrass
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Available at Milkweed Editions




Instruments in the Waiting

An Advent Meditation on Prayer and Time



Over the past year, I’ve been discovering that what I have long called prayer is less about speaking upward and more about allowing myself to be worked on. I used to understand it primarily as language — naming what hurts, asking for help, directing attention towards God. Lately, it feels more like a practice that slowly rearranges my interior life, often without my noticing until I’m already different.

This shift has become more visible to me as I continue discerning priesthood. I have found myself asking, sometimes with discomfort, what this practice actually does.

The phrase thoughts and prayers has grown thin in our culture, and I understand why. It can sound like retreat or avoidance, like a polite murmur offered in place of engagement. Yet the thinness may say more about how casually we treat the discipline than about the discipline itself. If it has any integrity, prayer seems to work gradually. It does not resolve the crisis in front of me. It does not guarantee the outcomes. Prayer, instead, shapes the person who must live through whatever unfolds.

Advent has sharpened this awareness. Waiting has a way of revealing where I’m impatient, where I want visible reassurance, where I confuse movement with faithfulness.

In the book of Exodus, God hears the cry of a suffering people and moves toward them, but the story does not accelerate after that. Liberation is promised, and then the long middle begins. There is wandering, complaint, fatigue, doubt. The danger is not only the power of the oppressor — it is the erosion that happens when hope stretches thin. I recognize that erosion in myself more easily than I would like to admit.

The Exodus story does not romanticize endurance. It shows how easily people lose orientation when time passes and nothing looks resolved. Yet again and again, there is a return to trust, obedience, and to the presence that does not withdraw even when confidence does.

Julian of Norwich steadied me early in this pilgrimage with her insistence that all shall be well, even when the evidence is not visible. Howard Thurman deepens that steadiness in a different register. In Jesus and the Disinherited, he writes for those living with their backs against the wall and names fear, deception, and hatred as forces that quietly deform the soul under sustained pressure. I do not read him as offering inspiration in the thin sense. I read him as taking Jesus at his word, as if those teachings were meant to be lived right here under pressure.

What strikes me is how concrete that reading feels. The work is interior, but it is not abstract. It has to do with what happens when fear begins to dictate behavior, when bitterness feels energizing, when compromise seems practical. It asks whether the inward life can remain intact long enough for love to remain credible.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass, speaks about tending land over seasons — about attention practiced daily, about gratitude that is enacted rather than felt. Healing, in her telling, unfolds through consistent care rather than urgency. That language of tending has begun to shape how I understand devotion. It’s not confined to spoken words. It can be carried in the body, in repetition, in the making of something offered to others.



From cooking the rose petals to finished piece

Earlier this month, I began making an Anglican rosary from rose petals saved across the year. It was for a friend whose child is currently ill. I cannot secure the outcome anyone would want. I cannot shorten the waiting or absorb the fear. What I can do is sit at my table and work, allowing my hands to gather what time has given. There is a quiet joy in that — not because the circumstances are light, but because the act itself resists helplessness. The rosary gathers days that held both dread and small mercies. It gathers breath and repetition. It becomes a way of staying present rather than drifting into abstraction.

I find that I am less interested in persuading God to intervene and more concerned with becoming someone who can remain attentive and steady for the long haul. The work of shaping beads from petals mirrors the shaping happening within me. It’s slow and imperfect. It’s sometimes tedious and unexpectedly sustaining.

Advent insists that God does not remain distant from suffering, but enters it and remains. That claim carries more weight for me this year than any explanation could. I’m trying, in smaller ways, to practice remaining as well.

Hope, as I am coming to know it, is less a feeling than a posture. It shows itself in the decision to continue showing up, to listen longer than is comfortable, to keep tending what has been entrusted to me. There is joy in discovering that love can be practiced in tangible ways, that attention can be trained, and even in uncertainty, there is meaningful work to be done. Nothing triumphant or dramatic, but steady. And more often than I expected, it’s quietly alive.

Next Essay
JANUARY | Epiphany: Liberation & Migration

Next week, I’ll be releasing the January essay on epiphany, liberation, and migration. I read texts that move from waiting into confrontation, beginning with the Book of Amos, which I had never read before and found astonishing. I’ll also be writing about The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone, and Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community by one of my very favorite authors, Wendell Berry.

If Advent has been teaching me how to remain present over time, Epiphany may press further — asking what that presence demands when injustice is named without euphemism.

Thank you so much for journeying with me as I continue my creative pilgrimage. Your support and engagement have meant more than I can say. God bless you and keep you. Be well.

JANUARY | Epiphany: Liberation & Migration


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