Waiting with Active Hope
Image credit Joanna Kosinska from Unsplash
What might cultivating a spirit of trust and patience mean for you this season? This upcoming year? What sparks of divine love do you recognize in your everyday life?
Anyone who knows me knows that Advent is my FAVORITE liturgical season. I love the haunting music, the prayers calling us deeper into quietness, the traditions that spark joy. I love how it is a season of new beginnings, marking the new liturgical calendar in many Christian traditions. It is a season of waiting and preparing. It is a season of hopeful light amidst the darkening days as we wait for God and celebrate the divine becoming human for us.
This Advent season has an especially sacred meaning for me, as I start a new chapter of my life. After a long year of personal discernment alongside the pandemic, I have moved states and I find myself waiting with active hope as I look toward finding and creating my home. Prayer, journaling and conversations with my loved ones accompany me as I explore innovative ways to live into my vocation of chaplaincy while I cultivate dreams I have for what my home could be personally in physical space and community.
What does it mean to wait with active hope? For me, waiting with active hope means cultivating a spirit of trust and patience with God and myself as I proactively prepare my heart, mind and body for God’s coming and God’s dream for me, for humanity, and for our world. This may seem like a daunting and challenging task this year especially, as so many of us have lived through one of the most uncertain and devastating years of our lives. That is why this new season is so special this year. It is a new beginning, a new opportunity for each of us to start again and carve out space for the divine’s loving presence to light a new way for us. This doesn’t need to look grand. In fact, it can be as simple as allowing yourself a few minutes each day to be fully present practicing something that brings your heart joy, or engaging in a family tradition from seasons past. Over the past few days I’ve found peaceful presence listening to Advent music from ambient Christian duo Salt of the Sound’s EP Waiting for the Dawn as I practice yoga during my nighttime routine.
Advent invites us to intentionally reside with God’s presence among us through actively hoping for more. God’s dream for us is bigger than we can imagine, and Advent is a wonderful time to actively, with eyes of hope, see and seek the ways God is lighting our paths with flickers of love toward something incredible and full of unconditional love and possibility.
