Journey

This Advent season I'm following the daily image and reflection at Advent Word.

On this blog I am responding to each day's given word. 

Today's word is 'Journey'.

The word journey evokes many images in my mind:

•  holidays,
• commuting to work,
• refugees travelling in hope of finding safety,
• a spiritual journey from darkness to light,
• pilgrimage,
• searching for meaning,
• searching for God.

Which to write about? None of these ideas inspires me today.

What does grab me and always does is the idea that God journeys to where we are.

We're looking forward to celebrating Christmas, the feast of God-with-us, of God coming into human life, so surprisingly in the form of a vulnerable new-born baby.

What a journey, for God to come to us like a child, bringing heaven into the ordinary. If only we can journey each day to see and live by that great truth.

One of my favourite Advent season poems is about God coming to us like that and when all seems most barren and hopeless. Here is Rowan Williams' poem:

Advent Calendar

He will come like last leaf's fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to the bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud's folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

© Rowan Williams

Published in 'The Poems of Rowan Williams' (Oxford 2002 and Grand Rapids MI 2004)

Image Credit: Walking in Fog, Public Domain