And Can it be That I Should Gain...

Several people have asked where this hymn came from, and I apologize for not including the credits when I first posted it last August (see below).

It was filmed by the BBC as part of its "Songs of Praise" series on 21 October 2007 in Wesley's Chapel in London. The author is, not surprisingly, Charles Wesley himself, who wrote the verse based on Acts 16:26. It was first published in 1738 in Wesley's Psalms and Hymns. According to the United Methodist Hymnal, the tune is "Sagina" by Thomas Campbell (1835).

I lifted the video from someone who had posted it on You Tube, also without the credits.  It took a bit of digging to track down the video's origins.  Apologies to the BBC also!

On Advent

“The season of Advent means there is something on the horizon the likes of which we have never seen before….What is possible is to not see it, to miss it, to turn just as it brushes past you. And you begin to grasp what it was you missed, like Moses in the cleft of the rock, watching God's back fade in the distance. So stay. Sit. Linger. Tarry. Ponder. Wait. Behold. Wonder. There will be time enough for running. For rushing. For worrying. For pushing. For now, stay. Wait. Something is on the horizon.”

            --Jan L. Richardson, Night Visions: Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas

I wrote the following reflection several years ago after trying to buy a pair of shoes at the North Dartmouth Mall on the Saturday before Thanksgiving.   

Getting ready for Christmas in New England used to be great fun, a time of anticipation for the coming of family, gifts, Santa, and in some circles, the most important coming of all: the annual celebration of the birth of Jesus.

No more. Malls are jammed with kids and parents. The kids, 90 percent of whom I am convinced are suffering from ADHD, race around stores, demanding expensive toys. We used to call them spoiled brats. Now it's a syndrome to be treated with drugs.

Parents are frantic, frustrated, angry, trying to do too much in too short a period of time Wanting to give the kids what they want, and not able to afford it. Or not knowing how to tell the kids that their demands for immediate gratification are unhealthy and inappropriate.

Advertisers start gearing up to take advantage of this situation well before Halloween now, enticing both children and parents with promises of happiness, fulfillment, joy, and piles of the most wonderful toys, gadgets, and software known to humankind. I actually saw Christmas decorations going up at the Fairhaven Wal-Mart on September 24th this year!

While I was at the North Dartmouth Mall on Sunday, a week before Thanksgiving, hordes of overly excited kids were dragging parents in from the jammed parking lot, laughing, shouting, crying, pleading. Santa was due any minute. The mall had arranged it, including what looked to be a pen for reindeer, for God's sake, on the main concourse outside Sears. I took one look and left, thinking I'd find another, calmer place to buy the shoes I needed. It was total insanity, the world gone mad for a season.

Can't we please remember what this time of year is all about?

It isn't Christmas yet. It's Advent, and Advent is a different season -- very different. 

For one thing, Advent marks the beginning of the Christian liturgical year, a time of newness, a fresh start. But more importantly, Advent is a time of preparation as we anticipate the coming of Christ once again into our hearts, minds, families, workplaces, lives. 

The preparation is both external and internal. Yes, we get out decorations, we clean the house, prepare for guests and family. We bake, shop, and perhaps start going to church again if we've let that slide for a while.

The most important preparation, however, happens within each of us, or should anyway: We are preparing to welcome anew the Christ child into our hearts and minds. Thus Advent becomes a time of self-examination, of meditation, of prayers for healing and forgiveness. We ask for forgiveness from God and each other. Perhaps there is penance we can do to prepare the way. We also forgive those who have perhaps hurt us recently.

Finally, and sometimes hardest of all, we forgive ourselves. We cleanse ourselves by doing all this, an internal housecleaning while we're dusting the furniture and putting clean sheets in the guest room. We also, perhaps, might make some promises to ourselves and God — to be more compassionate, understanding, forgiving, loving. Our Christian New Year's resolutions.

Advent anticipates eagerly as well. The most wonderful guest in human history arrives in our hearts and homes on Christmas. Imagine the gifts He brings! Not Nintendo or a new pair of skis or a model train set or the latest version of Barbie on an iPad — or whatever this year's marketing miracle is. What Christ brings lasts forever and ever, doesn't break the day after Christmas. He brings that love we all so desperately need and want -- and only rarely find under the tree.

That's why Christmas sometimes is a time of terrible letdown and disappointment. It's because we've the nagging feeling that we've given the wrong gifts, and because we are looking in the wrong place for the wrong gifts for ourselves.

The Christ Child brings a love so overwhelming and unimaginable, and gives it directly to each of us. We don't even have to unwrap it!

How does this love come into our lives? In many different ways: through lighting that fourth Advent candle,

 through baking brownies for a hurting friend, through prayer and meditation, through sending Christmas cards to long-lost friends, perhaps through a Christmas Eve service that's so beautiful it makes you weep, and through family gatherings, like my Aunt Sheila's annual Christmas Musicale.

It may come through delivering gifts to children in New Bedford who have a parent in prison.

That's Christ's love flowing into us. It comes through the gifts that we give to others, both tangible and intangible. Christ's love arrives in our hearts when we love others, forgive others, help others, support others, take time for others, listen to others. It also comes when we take time for ourselves, away from the noise of the world.

And Christ's love also arrives in our hearts through the gifts we receive — the delight of a new grandchild's smile as we lift him into our arms. The love in the eyes of a husband for a wife, a wife for a husband, a dear friend for a dear friend. A small token of love left for us under the tree.

Those are outward and visible signs of an inward spiritual gift: the love of Jesus Christ, God incarnate: In each of us for those around us — family, friends, co-workers, acquaintances, and even (especially) enemies.

We have much to prepare for, and so much to be grateful for. Christ's love. It leaves one in awe to remember, once again, what God does for us.

Anticipation. Advent is supposed to remind us of exactly what it is we are anticipating, and I promise you, it's better than anything you'll ever find in the insanity of the mall. This year, can we do it the way it was meant to be? 

Prepare ye the way ... and make the rough places plain.   

_______________________________

“The house lights go off and the footlights come on. Even the chattiest stop chattering as they wait in darkness for the curtain to rise.

In the orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised his baton.

In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself.

You hold your breath to listen. You walk up the steps to the front door. The empty windows at either side of it tell you nothing, or almost nothing. For a second you catch a whiff of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you’ve never been and a time you have no words for.

You are aware of the beating of your heart…The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. 

Advent is the name of that moment.”



— Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark, pp. 2,3