Alternative DigitalOrthodoxy Reflections on Year B / Advent 1:
a) Snapshots from the War on Drugs
Readings for the week: Year B / Advent 1
Isaiah 64:1-9 (NRSV)
1 Corinthians 1:3-9 (NRSV)
Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19 (NRSV)
Mark 13:24-37 (NRSV)
Song ideas for the week: Year B / Advent 1
Together To Celebrate: Year B / Advent 1
Lectionary Song: Year B / Advent 1
Resource ideas for the week: Year B / Advent 1
Textweek.com: Year B / Advent 1
Mustard Seeds: Year B / Advent 1 – “Waiting, Hoping”
Blogs and Reflections for the week: Year B / Advent 1
Dylan’s Lectionary Blog: Year B / Advent 1
Sojourners: Year B / Advent 1 – Advent Begins
Sojourners: Year B / Advent 1 – We Are the Clay
Sojourners: Year B / Advent 1 – The Pain of Creation
The Witness: Year B / Advent 1 Don’t Panic, Respond with Love
Sara ConversaZione: Year B / Advent 1
Bill Loader: Advent 1: 30 November Mark 13:24-37
Bill Loader: Advent 1: 30 November 1 Corinthians 1:3-9
Reflection:
Posted by Larli
The lectionary readings this week contain the famous Prepare Ye the Way comments from Isaiah 40. I googled “pathways” looking for a picture to put on the Advent mural at the front of the church.
Guess what I got pictures of?
Yep many pretty pathways to quiet English lanes, a few desert pathways as befitted the reading and rather unexpectedly several diagrams of neural pathways (and other sorts of circuit diagrams)
Which got me thinking about the interior pathways that need to be prepared during Advent…waiting isn’t just a matter of sitting still (or pacing up and down the train platform).
As Cheryl says, real waiting is holding the space. And physiologically speaking preparing the way is actually remapping the neural pathways which, in my head at least, circumnavigate my brain by the millisecond helping me to do everything but hold the space.
Hopefully Darren will blog about the external pathways which we need to prepare but for me at this point, how do I prepare the inner pathways, past the “seeming to wait”, to the real stillness of listening waiting at the heart of Advent? What are the wilderness parts of my mind which need to be straightened out and built up to enable Christ to be born in me this Christmas?
About djwright
Interior pathways, indeed: mind games, we might call them–and in the most positive sense–remembering that repentance|metanoia means, literally, a change of mind–Christophrenia instead of spiritual schizophrenia–which results in a life change!