Waiting with Our Lady for the coming of Our Saviour, we will meditate each day of Advent on a different aspect of the circumstances of His birth, the moment of The Incarnation amongst us.
Reflection: CREVICES
You must block every crevice in the walls of the stable, so that the wind and cold don’t enter in. T o do this, try to resist the temptation to selfishness. Don’t complain today if things don’t go your way.
Prayer: Lord Jesus, teach me always to think of others before myself.
Scripture: God’s Covenant With Jacob GENESIS 28:10-22
Jacob left Beer-sheba, and went toward Haran. And he came to a certain place, and stayed there that night, because the sun had set. T aking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it!
And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants; and your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and by you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth bless themselves. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done that of which I have spoken to you.
”Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place; and I did not know it. ”And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone which he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called the name of that place Bethel; but the name of the city was Luz at the first. Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God, and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house; and of all that thou givest me I will give the tenth to thee.”
Poem: R.S. Thomas – “The Absence”
It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply. It is a room I enter
from which someone has just
gone, the vestibule for the arrival
of one who has not yet come.
I modernise the anachronism
of my language, but he is no more here
than before. Genes and molecules
have no more power to call
him up than the incense of the Hebrews
at their altars. My equations fail
as my words do. What resources have I
other than the emptiness without him of my whole
being, a vacuum he may not abhor?
__________
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The featured image is “The People’s Census at Bethlehem” (1566), by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
