Picture the Beauty 22

Day 22 - Fourth Sunday of Advent: 'where our piety anxiously keeps its distance...'

It is now already the fourth Sunday of this project, and in contrast to an eventful couple of weeks it has been a quiet, relaxed, contemplative type of day, punctuated by making lunch for a housemate and helping a friend wrap her Christmas presents whilst listening to this chilled (and somewhat melancholy) music:

I also read a bit of the m-m, D. Bonhoeffer, and was particularly struck by this from one of his advent sermons:

'...God does not arrange matters to suit our opinions and views, does not follow the path that humans would like to prescribe. God's path is free and original beyond all our ability to understand or to prove.

There, where our understanding is outraged, where our nature rebels, where our piety anxiously keeps its distance - that is exactly where God loves to be. There, though it confounds the understanding of sensible people, though it irritates our nature and our piety, God wills to be and none of us can forbid it. Only the humble believe and rejoice that God is so gloriously free, performing miracles where humanity despairs and glorifying that which is lowly and of no account. For just this is the miracle of all miracles, that God loves the lowly. God "has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant." God in the midst of lowliness - that is the revolutionary, passionate word of Advent.'

Then, finally lighting four advent candles - a brief moment of redeeming my time, space and events.