Sunday 1: make room for travelling

Oh, Great Spirit,

whose voice I hear in the winds

and whose breath gives life to all the world, hear me.

I am small and weak.

I need your strength and wisdom.

Let me walk in beauty and make my eyes

ever behold the red and purple sunset.

Make my hands respect the things you have made

and my ears sharp to hear your voice.

Make me wise so that I may understand

the things you have taught my people.

Let me learn the lessons you have hidden

in every leaf and rock.

I seek strength, not to be superior to my brother,

but to fight my greatest enemy – myself.

Make me always ready to come to you

with clean hands and straight eyes,

so when life fades, as the fading sunset,

my spirit will come to you

without shame.

‘Oh Great Spirit’

Chief Yellow Lark

For a while I have been pondering the phrase ‘make room’.  It is an Advent phrase in reverse: the Gospels tell us there was ‘no room’ for the Christ family to stay in the inn.  In the UK this year, as elsewhere, there was a general election, where it seemed a great deal of air time and media attention was spent saying there was no room left here, that ‘we’ should close the borders, or give jobs to ‘British’ people.  The previous government have spent the last year declaring it will ‘stop the boats’: it will not allow any more migrants to cross the channel in small boats and land on our shores.  It will turn back those who seek refuge here.  Their actions begged many questions, but two that keep returning to me ask, ‘for whom should we make room? for what’?

At the heart of the story of Jesus’ birth are two journeys.  One sent Mary and Joseph across the wilds of occupied Israel from Nazareth to Bethlehem, to be counted in a occupying government’s census. The other sent them fleeing for their lives (through what is now, or was, Gaza) to Egypt, in a symbolic reversal of the Exodus.  It struck me I need to spend time, to use my Advent preparation time, making room for these symbolic journeys within myself. 

What needs to be taken out before I can focus on my journey?  

What needs to be put in, what resources do I need to travel into the heart of God-With-Us?  

What do I need to make room to maintain along the way, so that when I arrive I can flourish as I dwell with God?

Ten years ago, I came up with the phrase ‘travelling whilst sitting still’ to describe my spirituality, one forged by chronic illness, depression and disability.   I spend long periods in bed, I do not often leave my house.  I am trying to shoehorn as much creativity in my life as I can, because i know it is vital for my mental and spiritual health, but any sense of ‘progress’ is haphazard at best, and achingly slow to arrive.  I call myself a writer, a contemplative photographer and a visual artist.  I know myself as a beloved child of God.  I am a stumbling, grumbling, ungrateful, reluctant, impatient pilgrim who comes daily to a God who asks again and again, ‘will you make room for Me in all of you?’

But more insidious forces are marshalled against the time, space and will to walk and against the version of humanity that act embodies.  One force is the filling-up of what I think of as ‘the time between’, the time of walking to or from a place, of meandering, of running errands.  That time has been deplored as a waste, reduced, and its remainder filled with earphones playing music and mobile phones relaying conversations.  The very ability to appreciate this uncluttered time, the uses of the useless, often seems to be evaporating as does appreciation of being outside – including outside the familiar; mobile phone conversations seem to serve as a buffer against solitude, silence and encounters with the unknown … Obesity and its related health crises seem to be becoming more and more of a transnational pandemic as people in more parts of the world become immobilised and overfed from childhood on, a downward spiral where the inactive body becomes less and less capable of action.  That obesity is not just circumstantial – due to a world of digital amusements and parking lots, of sprawl and suburbs – but conceptual in origin, as people forget that their bodies could be adequate to the challenges that face them and a pleasure to use. …And as the climate heats up and oil runs out, this recovery [of imagination and bodily engagement] is going to be very important, more important perhaps than ‘alternative fuels’ and the other modes of continuing down the motorised route rather than reclaiming the alternatives. …I believe that most industrial-zone human beings need to rethink time, space and their own bodies …to remember how to integrate public transit and their own legs into an effective, ethical and sometimes deeply pleasurable way of navigating the terrain of their daily lives.

Rebecca Solnit Wanderlust: A History of Walking, xiii-xiv

travelling between times. (iPhone image)