Second Sunday of Advent

I went out walking yesterday morning. The weather app on my phone said rain from 9 a.m. on, through the afternoon and into the evening. I needed the exercise. So out I went at 8:15 to jam 45 minutes of fitness into my life before getting dressed for Sunday School and church. 

My walks are simple: walk 20 minutes in the "away" direction and then walk back home. Some mornings there are lots of right-angle turns through the grid of urban/suburban streets. Some mornings I walk mostly straight west without making decisions. It was a straight-street day yesterday. I saw a couple of runners  and a few quiet dog-walkers on a grey, grey day. Plus a long-legged walker in a pale orange hoodie, who quickly outpaced me. Brown leaves crunched underfoot -- oak leaves, the last to come down from the trees. 

I was trudging along next to an shoulder-high hedge when something yellow caught my eye. A tiny flower, poking through a mesh of unlit Christmas lights, the kind you drape over bushes, quick and easy coverage, no light strings to untangle later. It was a tiny, perfect forsythia blossom. Not plastic, not silk -- a real flower with a few green leaves on a hedge that was badly out sync with the natural cycle of fall, winter, spring.  

One little flower. An Advent thing. 

Behold, a Branch is growing

Of loveliest form and grace,

As prophets sung, foreknowing;

It springs from Jesse's race

And bears one little Flow'r

In midst of coldest winter,

zAt deepest midnight hour.

"Faith + hope = confidence." This was the formula in the Richard Rohr devotion in my email inbox this morning. Optimism is a gift of temperament, he said. Some of us are wired that way. Confidence is not like patience, which he said can be learned through practice. (I agree. Continual practice.) Confidence, faith plus hope, is a sign of participation in the life of God.

The sun will not rise today until 7:04, about the time I hope to hit the "Publish" button. I'm awake far too early, thinking Monday thoughts and cares. Soon I'll watch the electric candles in the living room window turn off one by one as they sense the morning light. I watched them come on yesterday afternoon, shortly after 3 p.m. -- such a dark and dingy day it was. 

The sky is gray this morning and moving, with a wind advisory. I won't be out walking in a westerly direction. It's chilly enough here in my chair. 

Where is this "life of God" of which mystics speak? Where do I look? 

In the wintry branches moving against the brightening sky? In the disordered flower on the forsythia hedge eight or ten blocks away from my home? In the hope and faith of cancer patients or ALS warriors treasuring life all the more gracefully because they must fight for it? In the laboring woman about to give birth? In the social justice advocates who fight for the dignity of Black lives? 

Somewhere in me? Today? 

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