2020 Blue Ocean Church Advent Meditation Podcast
Each podcast lasts approximately 8–10 minutes, and the format goes like this:
- We start with a variation on a Prayer of St. Patrick that reflects the Advent theme for the week. Historically, the four weeks of Advent focus first on hope, then peace, joy, and love. The Prayer of St. Patrick changes slightly each week to reflect those themes and we spend a minute using a portion of the prayer as a breath meditation to slow our bodies and minds so we can be open to the Divine.
- Next there is a time of petition where we have an opportunity to pray for something or someone each day. This portion is more specifically guided.
- Then Emily reads from a collection of Advent stories called All Creation Waits by author Gayle Boss and illustrated by David Klein. The author hails from western Michigan and when her first son was young she compiled stories to tell him during Advent of how various local animals respond to the darkness of winter and wait for the coming spring. Boss compiled those stories in book form and she has graciously given us permission to record those stories and share them with you.
- Finally, to close out the podcast, we meditate on a thought offered by the story we’ve just heard.
A brief word about Advent for those of you for whom it might be new:
The word advent means waiting—it’s a four-week season when we practice waiting on the presence of God to show up, symbolized in the celebration of the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day.
In the Julian calendar (which was a later version of the Roman calendar), Dec. 24 or 25 was winter solstice. In the northern hemisphere daylight diminishes between summer solstice and winter solstice and then increases again starting at the end of December. The Romans celebrated the day when sunlight started its renewed expansion, Dec. 25, as the birth of the Sun god.
And so it seems that Christians in the third century adopted the birthday of the Sun god as the birthday of the Son of God. The idea being that, after increasing darkness, there appeared a great light. When we celebrate Advent we practice waiting in the darkness for the Light of the World to appear.
I want to note that darkness has several meanings in Scripture. In the modern Western world, the metaphor of dark and light historically has racist tinges—as if dark implies nefariousness and light implies goodness. But in Scripture, which predates our modern associations, darkness far more often simply means “things which are hidden and unseen”; it can mean evil; and it can also mean something like “powerfully holy.” A few of the most profound moments in the Bible depict God surrounded by darkness or by dark clouds.
During this 2020 Advent we meditate on the stories of how animals wait and survive in the dark and learn from them what it means to wait on God—and on hope—when things seem hidden from us.