Advent for Peace

Renée Antrosio – December 5, 2023 1 Comment

This Advent- as we wait, prepare, and hope- we ask God to show us “another way” to be instruments of peace, ministers of mercy, and advocates for justice. So I am appreciating a different kind of Advent calendar, shared with us by Don Shay from South Africa- an Advent Calendar for Peace. This week’s readings include excerpts from Letter to a Young Activist During Troubled Times (Clarissa Pinkola Estes, 2003)

In any dark time there is a tendency to veer towards fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency too to fall into being weakened by perseverating on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails. We are needed, that is all we can know….

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip towards an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing…

May this Aramaic version of the Lord’s Prayer used in Open Table services add to your prayers:

Abba, God of the cosmos
breathe life into our hearts.
May your power and counsel rule our lives and the whole creation. May your will to love find its home in each human heart,
as it is at home throughout the cosmos.
Grant us today both bread and wisdom,
that we may in turn become bread for others.
Loose the cords of secret debts that bind us, and in the strength this freedom gives us, help us loose the cords we bind round others. Don’t let surface things delude us,
but free us from unripeness,
from all that holds us back from loving you. For from you is born the astonishing fire, the ruling will, the power and song
that give life to all,
here and now and forever, Amen.

May we be strengthened in our spirits and may our footsteps take us on the path of peace. -Renée