DECEMBER 1975

Advent is a time of anticipation and a time of sorrow. It is a time of the purple . . . a time of repentance. It is a time to be borning and a time to face dying. It is a lime for the heart to be filled with hope and to know it has been broken forever. I recently became aware that globality, when it has penetrated deep into your being, produces a shattered state of being. Shattering in that pieces of you are lying in all parts of this g1obe. Having known the burden of the world was dropped on your back, you thought it would drive you into the ground, as it would happen in a cartoon. And you'd be down there in a hole, looking dazed and maybe you could stay there. Maybe you could be Atlas, even. And merely hold it on your shoulders. Days of sweet monotony.

It didn't happen that way. It was more like the world was dropped on your back and exploded upon impact, and you with it. And pieces of flesh and bone and feelings and longings and dreams were ripped loose and scattered to the four winds. And you've been forced to live, feeling more unwhole than ever in your life, as though nothing had happened. A tiny piece of you makes a call, teaches a course, meets new people ... and they don ' t even know they are meeting a mirage . You think your home is in one place, and you find yourself heartsick and homesick for another. I've been fortunate to see so much of the world, and yet I find myself consumed with worry and desperate longing to be in Asia and India and Africa and Europe. Part of me has been left in all those places in a very concrete way. I have never been on a global trip that I did not feel I had failed.

Yet that has in no way diminished my inexplicable love for places that I have very human reasons to hate. We are the lucky ones to have fallen in love with this world. Our calling is to be people without a country for the rest of our lives ... strangers in foreign lands and homesick forever. Our apostasy this Advent is the terror within us that I lures us so many days not to be born but to die now. Advent's judgement is our agony. We get trapped in the false glory of times long past and gone. We forget that the only glory is in this moment. That is why the mercy of Advent is its promise. This Advent I choose to be shattered in pieces across this world: in Majuro, in Oombulgurri, in Kwangyung­Il, in Maliwada, in Kawangware, in Trastevere, in Isle of Dogs, in City Five. I choose to be a Son of God. And my prayer is for the borning of my homesick heart into these many whole and new me's. Merry Christmas, World!

THE ADVENT OF MYSTERY

Into the raw wild shock of numbing death,

Our carousel amuck, the spinning earth,

Has come this season, as a choking breath,

The objectivity of awesome birth.

The incarnational deeps of a new world,

At every moment present, all­unasked,

To final limits powerfully hurled,

Stripped naked, ravished, utter guilt unmasked.

Oh feel within the vibrancy of powers,

Transformed existence, nothing is the same,

The actual new birth­reclaimed as ours,

Celebration in the midst of pain. ­

Yet shattering doubt, enigma scarce revealed

In perfect love, the long­known yearning healed.