Ist Sunday of Advent (Year A)

Mersey Leven Catholic Parish

OUR VISION

To be a vibrant Catholic Community 

unified in its commitment 

to growing disciples for Christ 

Parish Priest: Fr Mike Delaney 
Mob: 0417 279 437 
mike.delaney@aohtas.org.au
Assistant Priest: Fr Paschal Okpon
Mob: 0438 562 731
paschalokpon@yahoo.com
Seminarian in Residence: Kanishka Perera
Mob: 0499 035 199
kanish_biyanwila@yahoo.com
Priest in Residence:  Fr Phil McCormack  
Mob: 0437 521 257
pmccormack43@bigpond.com
Postal Address: PO Box 362, Devonport 7310
Parish Office: 90 Stewart Street, Devonport 7310 
(Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 10am - 3pm)
Office Phone: 6424 2783 Fax: 6423 5160 
Email: merseyleven@aohtas.org.au
Secretary: Annie Davies
Finance Officer: Anne Fisher
Pastoral Council Chair:  Felicity Sly
Mob: 0418 301 573
fsly@internode.on.net

Mersey Leven Catholic Parish Weekly Newsletter: mlcathparish.blogspot.com.au

Parish Mass times for the Month: mlcpmasstimes.blogspot.com.au

Weekly Homily Podcast: mikedelaney.podomatic.com 

Archdiocesan Website: www.hobart.catholic.org.au for news, information and details of other Parishes.

         

PLENARY COUNCIL PRAYER

Come, Holy Spirit of Pentecost.
Come, Holy Spirit of the great South Land.
O God, bless and unite all your people in Australia 
and guide us on the pilgrim way of the Plenary Council.
Give us the grace to see your face in one another 
and to recognise Jesus, our companion on the road.
Give us the courage to tell our stories and to speak boldly of your truth.
Give us ears to listen humbly to each other 
and a discerning heart to hear what you are saying.
Lead your Church into a hope-filled future, 
that we may live the joy of the Gospel.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord, bread for the journey from age to age.   
Amen.
Our Lady Help of Christians, pray for us.
St Mary MacKillop, pray for us.

Parish Prayer

Heavenly Father,

We thank you for gathering us together 
and calling us to serve as your disciples.

You have charged us through Your Son, Jesus, with the great mission

  of evangelising and witnessing your love to the world.

Send your Holy Spirit to guide us as we discern your will

 for the spiritual renewal of our parish.

Give us strength, courage, and clear vision 
as we use our gifts to serve you.

We entrust our parish family to the care of Mary, our mother,

and ask for her intercession and guidance 
as we strive to bear witness

 to the Gospel and build an amazing parish.

Amen.

Our Parish Sacramental Life

Baptism: Arrangements are made by contacting Parish Office. Parents attend a Baptismal Preparation Session organised with a Priest.

Reconciliation, Confirmation and Eucharist: Are received following a Family–centred, Parish-based, School-supported Preparation Program.

Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults: prepares adults for reception into the Catholic community.

Marriage: arrangements are made by contacting one of our priests - couples attend a Pre-marriage Program

Anointing of the Sick: please contact one of our priests

Reconciliation:  Ulverstone - Fridays (10am - 10:30am), Devonport - Saturday (5:15pm– 5.45pm)

Eucharistic Adoration - Devonport: Every Friday 10am - 12noon, concluding with Stations of the Cross and Angelus
Benediction with Adoration Devonport:  First Friday each month - commences at 10am and concludes with Mass

Legion of Mary: Wednesdays 11am Sacred Heart Church Community Room, Ulverstone

Prayer Group: Charismatic Renewal – In Recess until Mon 13th January. For information: Michael Gaffney 0447 018 068

Weekday Masses 3rd – 6th Dec, 2019                                                      

Tuesday:         9:30am Penguin                                                                           

Wednesday:    9:30am Latrobe 
Thursday:       12noon Devonport
                       1:00pm Tandara Nursing Home
Friday:            9:30am Ulverstone
                       12noon Devonport                
Next Weekend 7th & 8th December

Saturday:          9:30am Ulverstone  
Saturday Vigil:  6:00pm Devonport
                         6:00pm Penguin (LWwC)
Sunday Mass:    8:30am Port Sorell (LWwC)
                        9:00am Ulverstone
                        10:30am Devonport (LWwC)
                        11:00am Sheffield
                         5:00pm Latrobe

                        

CHRISTMAS MASS TIMES 2019

OUR LADY OF LOURDES STEWART ST, DEVONPORT

Christmas Eve 6:00pm Children’s Mass

Christmas Eve 8:00pm Vigil Mass

ST PATRICK’S GILBERT ST, LATROBE

Christmas Day 10:00am Mass

ST MARY’S KING EDWARD ST, PENGUIN

Christmas Eve 8.00pm Vigil Mass

ST JOSEPH’S MASS CENTRE ARTHUR ST, PORT SORELL

Christmas Day 8.30am Mass

SACRED HEART ALEXANDRA RD, ULVERSTONE

Christmas Eve 6.00pm Children’s Mass

HOLY CROSS HIGH ST, SHEFFIELD

Christmas Day 9:30am Mass

                                      

MINISTRY ROSTERS 7th & 8th DECEMBER 2019

Devonport:

Readers: Vigil: A McIntyre, M Williams, C Kiely-Hoye 10:30am F Sly, J Tuxworth, T Omogbai-musa

Ministers of Communion: Vigil B&B Windebank, T Bird, Beau Windebank

10.30am: S Riley, M Sherriff, R Beaton, D&M Barrientos, G Keating

Cleaners 6th Dec: M.W.C. 13th Dec: F Sly, M Hansen, I Hunter

Piety Shop 7th Dec: H Thompson 8th Dec: K Hull

Ulverstone:

Reader/s: E Cox   Flowers: M Byran   Hospitality:  Filipino Community

Ministers of Communion: M Murray, J Pisarskis, C Harvey, P Grech

Church Cleaning 8th Dec: K.S.C.

Penguin:

Greeters:   Fifita Family      Commentator:  E Nickols    Readers: Fifita Family

Ministers of Communion: M Murray, T Clayton   Liturgy: S.C. C      Setting Up: T Clayton

Care of Church: S Coleman, M Owen

Latrobe:

Reader:  M Eden    Ministers of Communion:   I Campbell     Procession of Gifts:  J Hyde

Port Sorell:

Readers: G Bellchambers, P Anderson    Ministers of Communion: T Jeffries    Cleaners:  C & J Howard

                                  

ADVENT BLESSING

Lord God, your Church joyfully awaits the coming of its Saviour, who enlightens our hearts and dispels the darkness of ignorance and sin.

Pour forth your blessings upon us as we light the first candle of this wreath; may its light reflect the splendour of Christ, who is Lord, for ever and ever.

All: Amen

                                  

Readings This Week: First Sunday of Advent – Year A

 First Reading: Isaiah 2:1-5

Second Reading:  Romans 13:11-14

Gospel: Matthew 24:37-44

PREGO REFLECTION ON TODAY’S GOSPEL:

Advent is a season of preparation, so I take time and care in how I prepare to pray today. 

I may choose to light the first candle on an Advent wreath, making this a focus for my attention. Alternatively, my focus may rest on some other Advent image, colour or music. 

Perhaps I take a long, deep breath as I try to slow down to pray. 

Jesus encouraged his followers to be alert and awake, to 'stand ready' to greet him. 

I allow my body to settle into an alert, grounded, wakeful posture. 

What do I bring to my prayer today? 

When I meet God in prayer, in what state of mind and body will God find me? 

When I am ready, I read the Gospel slowly, reflecting on the images Jesus uses to share his message. 

What do I notice when I ponder these things? 

What do I need to do to be ready to greet Christ, now in this moment of my prayer, and in these coming weeks of Advent? 

I share my reflections with God. 

When I am ready, I ask God for all that I need to feel prepared to welcome the Christ Child of Christmas into my heart. 

I close my prayer saying 'Glory be to the Father …

Readings Next Week: Second Sunday of Advent – Year A

First Reading: Isaiah 11:1-10

Second Reading:  Romans 15:4-9

Gospel: Matthew 3:1-12

                                  

Your prayers are asked for the sick: 

Margaret Becker, Marilyn Bielleman, Tony Kiely, Brenda Paul, Erin Kyriazis, Carmel Leonard, Philip Smith, Frank McDonald & …

Let us pray for those who have died recently: 

Peter Williams, David Cole, Geoffrey Woods, Sandie Vanbrugh, Fay Glover, Murray Hay, Gerald Eeles, Peter Imlach, Donna Meadowcroft, Des King 

Let us pray for those whose anniversary occurs about this time: 28th November – 4th December

Stanley Hennessy, Jill DePietro, Allan Morley, Cyril Knaggs, Margaret Delaney, Arthur Cooke, Terence Murphy, Noreen Johnson, Cecilia Rootes, Iris Nickols, Lorraine Sullivan, Neville Tyrell, Marjorie Simpson, Peter Flynn

May the souls of the faithful departed, 

through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen

                                       

Weekly Ramblings

I begin with an apology. I missed mentioning in last week’s Newsletter that the Advent Reconciliation Services are on the 2nd & 5th December – that means they are on this coming Monday at Our Lady of Lourdes and Thursday at Sacred Heart with both starting at 7pm. There are possibly lots of reasons I missed the dates but I just have to admit December is here much quicker than I imagined and I didn’t check the diary!

Fr Paschal will be travelling to Perth with the Tasmanian Youth attending the Australian Catholic Youth Festival later this week and will be away next weekend as part of that Festival. This means that there will be a Lay Led Liturgy of the Word with Communion at the following Centres next weekend (7/8th) – Penguin (Vigil); Port Sorell and Devonport (10.30am Sunday). Thank you for your ongoing support of the Lay Liturgical Leaders as they support us and our Sunday Worship Communities.

Take care on the roads and in your homes,

                                     

In Our Parish

KNIGHTS OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS: 
The next meeting will be held at the Parish Hall Devonport thsi Sunday 1st December commencing at 6:00pm.

CHRISTMAS PARTY – ULVERSTONE:
‘Come one – come all’ to our annual Christmas Party on Tuesday 3rd December starting at 1:45pm at Sacred Heart Church Community Room Ulverstone. We hope you will join us for some light entertainment, a cuppa and a chat. 
RSVP 1st December to Juliet Smith 6425:5854, Debbie Rimmelzwaan 0419 142 374 Elizabeth Cox 0400 179 297.

FEAST OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION:
A reminder to all to pray on the 8th December, feast of the Immaculate Conception the "HOUR OF GRACE" at noon. If you need more information please ring Monique on 64 242 161

ADVENT GATHERING 2019:
‘The wilderness and the dry land shall rejoice, the desert shall rejoice and blossom abundantly' Isaiah 35:1
We are invited to create a more joyful, more hope filled and servant Church.
Date: 5th December, 10am – 11:30am Parish House, Devonport. Contact Clare Kiely-Hoye 0418 100 402

CHRISTMAS PLAY - SACRED HEART CHURCH CHRISTMAS EVE MASS:
‘CALLING ALL CHILDREN’ would you like to take part in the nativity play at the 6pm Christmas Eve Mass at Sacred Heart Church? You are very welcome to come along to practise during 9am Mass at Sacred Heart Church on Sunday 8th, 15th, and 22nd December. If you would like more information please phone Charlie Vella 0417 307 781.

PIETY SHOP - OLOL & SACRED HEART CHURCH: 
A variety of Christmas Cards are now available also 2020 Columban Calendars. 

THURSDAY 5th December, Eyes down 7:30pm. Callers Merv Tippett & Brendan O’Connor

PLENARY 2020.
You are invited to a conversation with John Warhurst AO, Chair of Concerned Catholics Canberra/Goulburn Diocese, about his commitment to Catholic Church Renewal and reform.
Don’t miss this opportunity!!
Saturday  7th December  11am – 1 00 pm     at     St Patrick’s College, Launceston.
Enquiries    -    MacKillop Hill    Ph 6428 3095  

OUR ADVENT MASS
The setting
You may notice that Advent allows us to express the hope and joy of the season by decorating our place of worship with flowers. 

Both the Advent wreath and nativity displays are extra-liturgical. In our parish we choose to use blue candles (where possible) to signify the imminence of hope and a rose candle for Gaudete Sunday as a sign of joy. 

The Mass
Introduction: There will be moments of silence before and after the readings. 
Mass will then begin at the rear of the Church with the Introductory Rites (Greeting).

                                    

Letter From Rome

No Crib For His Bed

Pope Francis to issue new document on the real meaning of the Nativity Scene. Robert Mickens, Rome. November 28, 2019. 

This article is from the La-Croix International website - you can access the site here but complete access is via paid subscription

Christians in the West start the new liturgical year this Sunday with the beginning of Advent.

Traditionally, this has been a season marked by joyful waiting for the arrival of Christmas. 

And, yet, a week-and-a-half before Advent had even arrived, the governor's office of Vatican City had already hoisted a giant Christmas tree in St. Peter's Square.

So much for waiting, joyfully or otherwise…

When the tree went up, Pope Francis was not even in Rome. He was finishing up a pastoral visit to Bangkok (Thailand) before heading on to Japan. But the very day after he returned to the Vatican he went to the square, not to inspect the tree, but to hold his weekly general audience.

"Next Sunday is the beginning of the liturgical season of Advent," he said at the conclusion of the audience.

"I will go to Greccio to pray in the place where St. Francis of Assisi made the first manger scene," he continued.

The pope said he would also issue a special letter from Greccio, a town in the Apennine Mountains north of Rome. The aim of this new papal document, he said, was to help believers "understand the significance" of the Nativity scene.

It is said that St. Francis of Assisi developed the first living manger scene in 1223 in the side of the mountain in Greccio, which was one of his favorite hermitages. He wanted to make the fact of the Incarnation of the Word – God made flesh – a reality for the poor people of the town.

Pretty simple, right? So some may be asking why the pope needs to write a letter to explain the significance of this.

Obviously, the soon-to-be 83-year-old Francis believes many people have forgotten that the Incarnation of the Word – the Word made flesh – is the foundation of Christian faith.

"That is the truth, that is the revelation of Jesus. That presence of Jesus Incarnate. That is the point," he said in the early months of his pontificate during a morning Mass at his Santa Marta Residence.

According to Pope Francis, this is scandalous to those who do not believe.

"We can do all the social work we like, and people can say how good the Church is, what good social work the Church does. But if we say we do this because those people are the flesh of Christ, it gives rise to a scandal," he said.

The pope's new letter on the Nativity scene will likely build on this and other thoughts he's shared over the years about the Incarnation.

Touching the flesh of Christ in the flesh of the poor

"If we truly wish to encounter Christ, we have to touch his body in the suffering bodies of the poor," Francis wrote in 2017 in his message for the first World Day of the Poor.

"The Body of Christ, broken in the sacred liturgy, can be seen, through charity and sharing, in the faces and persons of the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters. Saint John Chrysostom's admonition remains ever timely: 'If you want to honor the body of Christ, do not scorn it when it is naked; do not honor the Eucharistic Christ with silk vestments, and then, leaving the church, neglect the other Christ suffering from cold and nakedness,'" the pope said.

In his message for this year's World Day of the Poor, Francis reiterated the point.

"The situation of the poor obliges us not to keep our distance from the body of the Lord, who suffers in them. Instead, we are called to touch his flesh and to be personally committed in offering a service that is an authentic form of evangelization," he said.

"Commitment to the promotion of the poor, including their social promotion, is not foreign to the proclamation of the Gospel. On the contrary, it manifests the realism of Christian faith and its historical validity," the pope insisted.

The point Francis is trying to make is that "whoever does not love the brother (or sister) whom he can see cannot love God whom he has not seen" (1 John 4:20).

"The criteria of Christian love is in the Incarnation of the Word… A love that does not recognize that Jesus came in the flesh, in the flesh, is not the love that God asks of us," the pope said in another one of those Santa Marta homilies some years back.

Francis said our love must be "tangible, with the works of mercy" by which we touch "the flesh of Christ, of Christ Incarnate."

He said it was "for this reason that the deacon Lawrence said the poor are the treasure of the Church… since they are the suffering flesh of Christ.

"We don't know what the pope is going to say in his new letter on the significance of the manger scene.

But no doubt he'll point out that it is more than just a popular symbol and a badge of one's Christian identity. It is also a challenge and summons to care for the poor and the outcast.

Expect the pope to share his thoughts on the True Meaning of Christmas.

                              

Word Becomes Flesh 

This article is taken from the Daily Email sent by Fr Richard Rohr OFM from the Center for Action and Contemplation. You can subscribe to receive the email by clicking here 

I invite you to read these Daily Meditations contemplatively, going deeper than the mental comprehension of words, using words to give answers or solve immediate problems and concerns. Contemplation is waiting patiently. It does not insist on quick closure, pat answers, or simplistic judgments, which have more to do with egoic, personal control than with a loving search for truth.

Try reading the following ideas in a contemplative way:

• Christ is everywhere.
• In him every kind of life has a meaning and a solid connection.
• Every life has an influence on every other kind of life.
• Jesus Christ came to earth so that “they all may be one” (John 17:21) and “to reconcile all things in himself, everything in heaven and everything on earth” (Colossians 1:20).

Pick one idea and linger with it. Focus on the words until they engage your body, your heart, your awareness of the physical world around you, and most especially your core connection with a larger field. Sit with the idea and, if need be, read it again until you feel its impact, until you can imagine its larger implications for the world, for history, and for you. (In other words, until “the word becomes flesh”!)

Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (Convergent Books: 2019), 4, 7, 8.

                           

What Constitutes Fidelity

This article is taken from the archive of Fr Ron Rolheiser OMI. You can find this article and many others by clicking here 

It’s becoming increasing difficult in today’s world to trust anything or anybody, for good reason. There’s little that’s stable, safe to lean on, trustworthy. We live in a world where everything is in flux, is flux, where everywhere we see distrust, abandoned values, debunked creeds, people moving on from where they used to be, contradictory information, and dishonesty and lying as socially and morally acceptable. There is little left of trust in our world.

What does this call us to? We’re called to many things, but perhaps nothing more important than fidelity, to be honest and persevering in who we are and what we stand for. Here’s an illustration.

One of our Oblate missionaries shares this story. He was sent to minister to a cluster of small Indigenous communities in Northern Canada.  The people were very nice to him but it didn’t take him long to notice something. Basically every time he scheduled an appointment the person wouldn’t show up. At first, he attributed this to miscommunication, but eventually he realized the pattern was too consistent for this to be an accident and so he approached an Elder in the community for some counsel. “Every time a make an appointment with someone,” he told the Elder, “they don’t show up.” The Elder smiled, knowingly, and replied: “Of course, they won’t show up, the last thing they need is to have an outsider like you organizing their lives for them!”  So the missionary asked: “What do I do?” The Elder replied: “Well, don’t make an appointment, just show up and talk to them! They’ll be nice to you. More importantly though, this is what you need to do: Stay here for a long time and then they will trust you. They want to see whether you’re a missionary or a tourist. Why should they trust you? They’ve been betrayed and lied to by most everyone who’s come through here. Stay for a long time and then they’ll trust you.”

Stay for a long time and then they’ll trust you. What does it mean to stay for a long time? We can hang around and not necessarily inspire trust, just as we can move on to other places and still inspire trust. In its essence, staying around for the duration, being faithful, has less to do with never moving from a given location than it has to do with staying worthy of trust, with staying faithful to who we are, to the creed we profess, to the commitments and promises we have made, and to what’s truest inside us so that our private lives do not belie our public persona.

The gift of fidelity is the gift of a life lived honestly. Our private honesty blesses the whole community, just as our private dishonesty hurts the whole community. “If you are here faithfully,” writes Parker Palmer, “you bring great blessing.” Conversely, writes Rumi, “If you are here unfaithfully, you bring great harm.” To the degree that we are true to the creed we profess, the family, friends, and communities we’ve committed to, and to the deepest moral imperatives within our private soul, to that degree we are faithfully with others, and to that degree we are “staying with them for a long time”.  The reverse is also true, to the degree that we are not true to the creed we profess, to the promises we’ve made to others, and to the honesty innate in our own soul, we are being unfaithful, moving away from others, being the tourist not the missionary.

In his Epistle to the Galatians, St. Paul tells us what it means to be with each other, to live with each other, beyond geographical distance and other contingencies in life that separate us. We are with each, faithfully, as brothers and sisters, when we are living in charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, mildness, perseverance, and chastity. When we are living inside these, then we are “staying with each other” and not moving away, no matter any geographical distance between us. Conversely, when we are living outside of these we are not “staying with each other”, even when there is no geographical distance between us. Home, as poets have always told us, is a place inside the heart, not a place on a map. And home, as St. Paul tells us, in living inside the Spirit.

And it is this, I believe, that ultimately defines fidelity and perseverance, separates a moral missionary from a moral tourist, and indicates who’s staying and who’s moving away.

For each of us to stay faithful, we need each other. It takes more than a village, it takes all of us. One person’s fidelity makes everyone’s fidelity easier, just as one person’s infidelity makes everyone’s fidelity more difficult. So, inside a world that’s so highly individualistic and bewilderingly transient, when it can feel as if everyone is forever moving away from you, perhaps the greatest gift we can give each other is the gift of our own fidelity, to stay for a long time.

                             

In The Beginning Was The Word

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales have dedicated 2020 to be a year of focus on the Bible and ‘The God Who Speaks’. The prologue from John’s Gospel is read on Christmas day and famously speaks about ‘the Word’, and so we will be using these weeks of Advent, which begin the Year of the Word, to prepare to hear John’s familiar text in a new way. How do the scriptures for the Sundays of Advent invite us to a deeper engagement with what John will tell us about ‘the Word’ on Christmas day? For the first Sunday of Advent, Brian McClorry SJ, a member of the Corpus Christi Jesuit Community in Boscombe, draws us into the mystery of time as we consider what it means for the Word to be – or have been – ‘in the beginning’.

This article is taken from the ThinkingFaith.org website where you can find a wide range of articles by clicking here

On Christmas day, the gospel for Mass is the prologue to John’s Gospel. As Advent leans us towards Christmas, it may be good to pause over John’s opening words as a kind of remote preparation: ‘In the beginning was the Word’.[i]

In contrast to John, Mark’s Gospel opens with: ‘The beginning of the gospel about Jesus’[ii]. This sounds like the start of a narrative in which events happen within time. John’s opening, however, is unqualified. Nothing (ironically, we might say) happens. It’s a beginning innocent of proper names and actions. No doubt John (and Mark) reflect the opening words of Genesis: ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth.’[iii] Genesis, however, like Mark, starts with something happening, with God creating. The opening words of Genesis, so stylised and hieratic, are already a narrative. John’s ‘beginning’ is narrative-free, as well as mysterious, inviting and connective. There is an arresting concision that encourages us to stop and wonder – indeed, to wonder about wonder: ‘In the beginning’?

‘The Word’, which was (or is?) in the beginning, has often been said to resonate with some well-known scripture themes and concerns of John’s time and place, notably reason and wisdom. ‘The Word’ also invites, provokes and evokes thoughts and feelings about language, imagination and understanding. We might well be startled to hear of ‘the Word’, in the singular, if we are looking for words, for some sequence or series, or a hint of evolution – or expect there to be narrative or poetry. Maybe we have stumbled across an obscure treatise? John, however, lets us wait for what might become hymn or poetry. He starts by taking us behind these concerns to the Word, which was (or is?) ‘in the beginning’; to the Word, which at present is narrative-free. Later John gives us extraordinary narratives which are set in ‘time’. But his unqualified phrase about the Word ‘in the beginning’ does raise questions about time.

The crumbling of time

Narratives, or the rather friendlier ‘stories’, certainly depend on time: ‘Once upon a time…’ Time, however, is very difficult to pin down. John’s beginning seems the obverse of the situation described by a theoretical physicist, Carlo Rovelli, from the Centre de Physique Théorique in Marseille. At the most elemental level of the cosmos, time does not figure in the equations. There are events, relations between events, processes – complex vibrations in a quantum field. But time makes no appearance. There is, in Rovelli’s memorable phrase, ‘a crumbling of time’. Nevertheless time does emerge, and does so largely through the advent of human consciousness. Rovelli ironically says that his account of time’s advent is the most difficult part of his account. Our ordinary daily experience involves being in and of the world and it comes from within. Time emerges from our perspective – a reality physicists need not forget. Here, as elsewhere, ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ need to learn how to sit at ease together.[iv]

So the ‘crumbling of time’ is not a loss of certainty, or the threatened collapse of reality, but the precursor and basis of a world where discovery beckons, horizons widen, and paradigms are shifted. The emergence of time, of consciousness is not straightforward or uniform. The scriptures do have a wide, strong and persistent sense of what is inner: ‘O Lord you search me and you know me…’.[v] Nonetheless, many passages do not register like this – they are innocent of what things were like for people, or what they thought and felt about them. Once more objective and subjective need to set up house together. We certainly know that exclusively extrinsic biographies or (especially) autobiographies do not really work – they will not wash. Even so, at times we keep our inner and outer lives at an untroubling distance, to the detriment of both. Perhaps the readings for this first Sunday of Advent invite us to hold such inner and outer narratives in dialectic and to see what emerges. Isaiah and Matthew tell us about big, outer events that will happen to entire peoples ‘in the final days’[vi], at ‘an hour you do not expect’[vii]; whereas St Paul talks about personal behaviour, at this very moment.[viii]

The saga style

John Barton suggests that one characteristic of narrative in the Old Testament (sometimes called the Tanakh, or simply the Hebrew Bible) is the ‘saga style’.[ix] Named after the Icelandic sagas, it is ‘a plain laconic style in which hardly anything is said about the emotions or the appearance of the characters, and we are left to make our own deductions about what is going on beneath the surface…’ The ‘saga style’ is different from the many other styles of writing in the Old Testament – the prophetic, poetic or wisdom writings for example. But the saga style does give, or provide, or even demand space for wondering about the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ lives that make up the one life we live. We might ask, for example, of our first reading from Isaiah: what do the inner lives of warriors who turn swords into ploughshares look like? How does the conversion of an entire people play out in one person’s life? The saga style begs for a more revealing unity between objective and subjective. Other Old Testament styles do provide this. And John’s prologue also brings us to the cusp of such a gift – a reality which is recognisable in ordinary experience. If our lives are too much saga style, perhaps we need some reconstitution.

On a walk, the speaker of a poem by R.S. Thomas enters a moor ‘on soft foot’, says ‘no prayers’, but finds ‘praise enough’. He walks on, he says,

Simple and poor, while the air crumbled

And broke on me generously as bread.[x]

More is happening here than a moorland walk. The ‘crumbling of time’ brought Rovelli on a journey tracing the emergence of time. Thomas’s careful walk finds a ‘crumbling’ not so much of time but of space – air – which widens into a sense of expectation, generosity … and Eucharist. ‘In the beginning was the Word’ is laconically graceful, perhaps an easier grace than the saga style, but like the sagas it provides an inviting space for discovery. If we pause over John’s ‘in the beginning’, we are on the edge of a new narrative, and ‘the Word’ evokes a mood of promise about the narrative, something fresh which is also well rooted – it is truly a momentum word. Perhaps, as we start to hear John’s prologue, we are waiting for something as generous as bread. Yet the readings for this first Sunday of Advent leave the question of the length of our waiting open, perhaps even unanswerable. Paul advises the Romans that they ‘know the time’, and locates the day of salvation firmly in the dimension of time; but the gospel emphasises our uncertainty about time, and exhorts us to a permanent (or is it timeless?) readiness.

The chair

John’s prologue will no doubt be heard by people sitting in chairs or pews in churches and chapels around the country come Christmas day, in a variety of attitudes from polite boredom to consuming expectation. In a poem by Seamus Heaney there is a ‘you’ who sits on the basalt ‘throne’, which is ‘the wishing chair’ at the Giant’s Causeway on the northeast coast of Northern Ireland. Our deepest desires and yearnings are perhaps even more than ‘wishes’, which matter anyway. The poem ends not with the Word, but with ‘kelp’,

And ozone freshening your outlook

Beyond the range you thought you’d settled for.[xi]

Perhaps ‘In the beginning was the Word…’ is the kelp and ozone that begins to give that fresh imagination, which takes us generously beyond what we thought we’d settled for, whenever and wherever we sit or walk.

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[i] John 1:1-18. All scripture quotation are from the Revised New Jerusalem Bible, Study Edition (DLT, 2019).

[ii] Mark 1:1.

[iii] Genesis 1:1.

[iv] Carlo Rovel