Year: 2022

Good morning. I want to start with a poem which I heard on a recent Poetry Unbound podcast, written by Naomi Shihab Nye. .. [the full text of this poem may be found at https://onbeing.org/programs/naomi-shihab-nye-i-feel-sorry-for-jesus/]

I Feel Sorry for Jesus

People won’t leave Him alone.
I know He said, wherever two or more
are gathered in my name…
but I’ll bet some days He regrets it….

…..

….And that makes me feel like being silent
for Him, you know? A secret pouch
of listening. You won’t hear me
mention this again

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Christ Climbed Down” from A Coney Island of the Mind

Here we are, in Advent, again. We were in Advent a year ago, and the year before that, and on and on through all the years past. Advent begins a new year in the Christian calendar, but to me it feels different from the new year on January 1st, or the start of the school year, or even the Jewish new year, celebrated on Rosh Hashanah in the fall. Those new years to me feel like the turning of a page, the end of something old and the start of something new and unknown. But Advent seems not so much a turning toward something new as a returning to something very old.