Watch, dear Lord, with those who wake, or watch, or weep tonight, and let your angels protect those who sleep. Tend the sick. Refresh the weary. Sustain the dying. Calm the suffering. Pity the distressed. We ask this for the sake of your love. St. Augustine So the Wise-Ones were directed from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. Continue reading “#adventapertures2025: day 23”
Tag Archives: Advent 2025
#adventapertures2025: Blue Christmas
One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the soundContinue reading “#adventapertures2025: Blue Christmas”
#adventapertures2025: day 21
Silence has its own notation: dark Jottings of duration, but not pitch, A long black box, or little feathered hitch Like a new Greek letter or diacritical mark Silence is a function of Time, the lark In flight but not in song. A nothing which Keeps secrets or confesses. Pregnant, rich, Or awkward, cold, theContinue reading “#adventapertures2025: day 21”
#adventapertures2025: day 20
Sometimes, when we’re on a long drive, and we’ve talked enough and listened to enough music and stopped twice, once to eat, once to see the view, we fall into this rhythm of silence. It swings back and forth between us like a rope over a lake. Maybe it’s what we don’t say that savesContinue reading “#adventapertures2025: day 20”
#adventapertures2025: day 19
I praise you because you are artist and scientist in one. When I am somewhat fearful of your power, your ability to work miracles with a set-square, I hear you murmuring to yourself in a notation Beethoven dreamed of but never achieved. You run off your scales of rain water and sea water, play theContinue reading “#adventapertures2025: day 19”
#adventapertures2025: day 18
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, who knew a thing about maps, by which life moves somewhere or other used to tell this story from the war, through which history moves somewhere or other. ‘The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps sent out a reconnaissance unit into the icy wastes. At once it began toContinue reading “#adventapertures2025: day 18”
#adventapertures2025: day 17
To reach the place just ahead of you, what do you do? The shortest way between two points- that straight line, the most straight of greatest renown. You put one foot in front of the other and carry on, repeating yourself. Until you reach the point ahead, assuming initialContinue reading “#adventapertures2025: day 17”
#adventapertures2025: day 16
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the pointContinue reading “#adventapertures2025: day 16”
#adventapertures2025: Sunday 3
‘It was said of Rabbi Simcha Bunim that he carried two slips of paper, one in each pocket. On one he wrote: Bishvili nivra ha’olam – “For my sake the world was created.” On the other he wrote: V’anokhi afar v’aefer – “I am but dust and ashes.” He would take out each slip ofContinue reading “#adventapertures2025: Sunday 3”
#adventapertures2025: day 14
…darkness reaches out to offer whatever helping hand it can, calling us to trust it, saying, “Sometimes only the darkness will do.” We owe it to the darkness to reach out and grab that hand, to respect what it has to offer, to join it to the hand of light. Catherine Bird, The Divine HeartContinue reading “#adventapertures2025: day 14”
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