Advent Strength

In a world where atrocities, mass shootings, and war happen every day, where refugees take risks by leaving their homes because staying is a greater risk, and politicians choose sound bytes and notoriety over truth and good public policy,  these words by Robert Walsh speak to how I want to prepare for Christ’s coming this Christmas. I first heard them at the World AIDS Day Service in Billings Montana. I read this in church this Advent, during a week when the international, national, and local news was sad, and people in our church were facing their own personal challenges. Because God is sometimes referred to as "Ground-of-Being," I especially appreciate these words. 

When the great plates slip

and the earth shivers
and the flaw is seen to lie in what you trusted most

look not to mere solidity,
to weighty slabs of concrete poured

or strength of cantilevered beam
to save the fractured order.

Trust more the tensile strands of love

that bend and stretch

to hold you in the web of life that's often torn
but always healing.

The shifting plates, the restive earth,

your room, your precious life, they all proceed from love,
the ground on which we walk together.