The Pause is just so damn powerful. I feel like a Pause evangelical these days as it’s so desperately needed in these over-stimulated times. It’s a way to touch a place of relief and groundedness inside yourself which offers a spacious clarity about what you can do and where you can let go.
Leslie Hershberger
The idea of being ‘a pause evangelical’ attracts me. The reason for beginning this blog five years ago lay in the hope that God might use my words and images, that I might become a conduit for the Invitation of God to break through into our world, here and now.
In my pauses I do tend to ponder. But I often overlook the treasure. Luke’s picture of Mary taking time out, after the traumatic birth of her son, to look within and see God at work in her life seems so apt to me. Luke gives a still point in the middle of a story full of busyness and activity, bustling but bemused visitors from all walks of life suddenly breaking out in Hallelujahs, as they follow the prompts to come to see her - at that time and in that place - and to meet her son, who almost unbelievably, somehow is the long-awaited Christ.
Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.
(Luke 2.19 NRSV)
Mary kept all these things to herself, holding them dear, deep within herself.
(Luke 2.19 The Message)
Mary took time out to bring her head and heart together, to see the revelation of God happening in her world - right there, right then. Part of the Invitation of Advent is that this same Invitation to see God at work, is available to me - right now, right here - in all my ordinariness.
Advent can enable me to recalibrate to the wonder of Incarnation’s Invitation: God is indeed with us in every one of our everyday circumstances.
The second part of Incarnation’s Invitation promises that God is indeed visible to us in every detail of our everyday surroundings. Revelation is real and possible.
Am I willing to follow Mary’s example? Will I sit in God’s loving presence now and wait for God’s coming, God’s revealing to me - yes, even to me? I might know God is with me, I might see God in the next moment or it might be in the next year. Whenever it comes, the promises of Advent remain true; God is with each one of us and God will make God known to every one of us.
Today’s image was received on one of the greyest, coldest days of 2018. I had run out of energy long before and just needed to lie down. As I was scootering back to the car I saw a patch of rust on a signage pole. Making photographs of rust has delighted me ever since I was a child, drawn to the breaking down of texture, colour and change by the elements. It was a long before I discovered the Japanese art of Kintsugi (mending broken pots with gold: displaying the cracks in all their glory rather than trying to cover them up). Today’s image represents that same kind of authenticity in brokenness and breakdown to me. God made known in the here and now - and with such unexpected colour beneath the surface, colour which I had overlooked - to my depletion.
Where shall the word be found, where shall the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
T S Eliot 'Ash Wednesday '
Pondering Treasure. iPhone image.
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