a happy ending
a new beginning
a christ-child.

In this pregnant pause
while the earth holds its breath
waiting for what
it does not know,
let us have the faith
that even we,
with all our wise
and cynical
knowing,
would not imagine
the shape that love
will take

and instead just
have the faith
that it will come.

The italics below are created from the conversation with the men. The other words are lifted from Isaiah 35.

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom;
Life will be lived as it’s meant to be lived
everyone will be valued
everyone will know they are loved.

We shall see the glory of the Lord,
the majesty of our God.

Strengthen the weak hands
and make firm the feeble heart,
‘Be strong and do not fear!
Here is your God.
Know you have what it takes
to live through this.
Know you can find the will to get over it’.

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened
The sick will be well
The elderly will be loved
The children will be safe
The prisoner will be remembered.

For waters break forth in the wilderness
and streams in the desert;
The justice system becomes just
Governments stop being corrupt
People in Somalia and Africa have food to eat
Those who have nowhere to go find somewhere to live.

A highway shall be there,
and it shall be called the Holy Way;
and on this highway
everyone will be welcome
even those who we hate
and those who hate us.
We will be welcome too.

Together, we shall obtain joy and gladness
and sorry and sighing shall flee away.

This year I will practice the following. I think they’re faithful to an ancient story. I know they’re what I need to rediscover.

- i will practice acts of wild imagination
- i will practice letting what I am sure of be turned upside down
- i will practice being transformed
- i will practice making audacious choices

I hope i’ll do them within a framework of hope, peace, justice and love. I have a theory, though yet unproven, that they are what’s necessary if hope, peace, justice and love are to have any chance…

So this week’s task: wild imagination. I love imagination – i swear it keeps me breathing. I have to admit that the easiest imaginings to make real are those that are seemingly huge, because they’re so far out there, so divorced from current reality that they require the making of the new, not the changing of the old. I wonder if the greatest acts of imagination are those that believe the small things closest to us can, in reality, be very different. They’re harder acts of imagination because they involve changing ourselves, not the world.

I’ve been reading Lorna Hallahan’s essay ‘On Being Odd’ this week. It’s part of the Penguin collection of Best Australian Essays for 2010. I know I overuse adjectives on this blog, but this is an extraordinary piece of writing. It wouldn’t do justice to pick quotes to add here; the piece has to be read as a whole, and read over and over. I realised what made it so profound for me was that to honour the writing I had to not identify with it. I had to shut up, for once, and hear it.

I’m pretty convinced, actually, that one of the hardest acts of human imagination is to imagine another’s world and life as different to our own. That’s the kind of wild imagination I want to practice this week – letting another’s story simply be that; revelling and honouring another’s difference, and letting it change who I am.

In the next couple of weeks we’ll be delivering postcards to people at Kinglake and Marysville. They have a short introduction to the concept, a reflection, and then space for response – inviting people to finish the sentences ‘Waiting for…’ and ‘Grateful for…’. Their responses will be integrated into the next part of the space. This is different to how we imagined, but a few weeks ago we went to talk with people in the villages about our ideas for creating a waiting space, and they offered the same feedback in the two villages: they told us that a waiting space was important, but they also thought a space for gratefulness was just as important. So we’re integrating the two into the installation, in different ways.

I’ve been a bit anxious [i like to find things to worry about] that the added time for consultation and development has meant that we will miss the advent period… but of course, the waiting doesn’t finish just because christmas is over. In fact, the lack of resolution of the waiting becomes even more poignant after Christmas… living through all the build up to find that nothing much seems to have changed. But much as we sometimes think it does, the christian calendar doesn’t create the world’s reality – just because it’s Christmas doesn’t mean the world has hope… but it seems this space fits quite beautifully within a post-christmas world: trying to honour the tension between promise and reality in a world that makes recognising either so desperately impossible.

I don’t know how much of what we do I will put up here. It’s not really my story to tell, and the space doesn’t need advertising [and the people living in the villages don't need to be the focus of anyone's attention!]. But we’re incredibly grateful to the Share Appeal for funding it, and to the different artists / designers / chaplains etc who have made it possible…

Jonny has posted a really lovely advent movie, using footage he made of sky lanterns at the Big Chill festival with words from a prayer I wrote a few years ago. I’d use it on christmas eve, i think. He’s made it available as a free download on vimeo – and proost subscribers can download from the Proost site. And let me put in a plug for Proost again – a subscription is extraordinary value, especially with the Australian dollar being so good at the moment…

Perhaps you are searching for the joy that Mary found -
the joy that came from knowing that such an unexpected, unwanted event in her life
could somehow be turned into a much greater story
which would speak love into a broken world
and bring justice to those who have been oppressed.

Perhaps you are searching for the courage that Mary found -
the courage to say to the world
‘I might know where God is to be found
and i might know how God can be made real’

Perhaps you are searching for the faith that Mary found –
to believe that God might want to bring something divine to life in you:
love, perhaps,
grace,
forgiveness.

Whether you are searching for peace, joy, courage or faith,
Mary’s story lets us believe it might happen
in the most impossible places
and through the most unexpected people…

It means we can know with faith that God’s story,
brought to life once by a single pregnant teenager,
might be brought to life again by us here.

and in the space
between the full stop
and the capital letter
lies the untold story of
the birth of a baby

of the first moment she guessed it was starting
an unfamiliar pain
the rush of fluid
the cramping force
halting and hesitant
then fierce and determined

in the space between the full stop
and the capital letter
lies the moment she told him
it’s time
and he realised he’d never believed
that it was real

in the space between the full stop
and the capital letter
lies hours of screaming
terrifying
heart-stopping
blood-curdling
pain
till her fingers dig into the dirt
of the floor
and the wood
of the wall
and the skin
of his hand
and she wondered
he wondered
how she would
survive

in the space between the full stop
and the capital letter
lies his breathless anticipation
the worry when it all begins
that it will never end
that it will all go wrong
when it’s taking too long
and then it’s happening too fast
and then suddenly the desperation of the last final
push
and the rush
of the blood
and the fluid
and the baby
oh – the baby
slippery and sweet
and screaming
thank god

in the space between the full stop
and the capital letter
lies the bloodied body of the new born christ
a boy
and did they wonder at his eyelashes
and his tiny lips
and did they breathe with relief
that the God born from her womb
was normal
with real tears
and a heartbeat

and did they wish the space
between the full stop
and the capital letter
were longer
that the story we know
ended there
and that the world lost interest
at the end of one sentence
so the next wouldn’t have to begin…

We’ll be laying out a different image of the balloon girl in the centre of the worship space – towards the end of the service we’ll invite the men to light tealights and place them on the balloons… i love this image, but couldn’t find it in high res so we’re going to print it out small to give to each of the men with the following meditation attached. The bible reading will be Luke 1:26-38

there are few things more fragile
than an embryo of hope

given its chance of life only by those who say ‘yes’
to its promise

like the prophets who said yes to God’s urging
Mary who said yes to an angel
and Joseph who said yes to his Mary

like the people of faith through all of time
who have said yes to the promise of love

and as we sit by the side of our wall
- whatever that wall might be –
surrounded by the rubble and rubbish
of broken dreams and lives

what faith does it take to imagine
an embryo of hope
being brought to life here?

what ‘yes’ are you able to say
for it to be born in our world?

We’re not doing a basement space this year – instead we’re creating some installations for the temporary accommodation villages in the bushfire affected areas in Victoria. These villages have been created to accommodate people whose houses were burnt out during the February bushfires, so they each have a population of a couple of hundred people. We’re going to be putting a sacred space into the villages at Kinglake and Marysville, and if all goes to plan, to mirror the space in a public location here in the city. They will be on the theme of waiting – appropriate for the season, but also responsive to the reality of people living in these communities, where they are trying to keep living though their lives are on hold… The Share Appeal have given us a really generous grant which means we can pay the artists who are involved, and it’s shaping up to be quite a beautiful space. The space will grow and change a little over christmas, through summer and then for the anniversary of the fires.

I’m also working on a series of meditation spaces for Port Phillip Prison during Advent, and a service for Christmas Day.

I miss having a basement space to think about at the moment – whether on a christmas theme or any other. The between the spaces collaborators are meeting for a drink on sunday – we’ve got some plans for next year that are really exciting…

We’ve produced an advent candle lighting liturgy for congregations to use, with the hope of echoing the imagination of the prophets for a world created around restoration and justice.

Please download, distribute, adapt and use as you would like…

From week one:

God of the Advent,

Illuminate the world around us
so that we will see the cracks and stains
that mark the foundations of our community.

We pray for courage to look for your coming,
even though we know it will mean
that we will never see the world
with the same eyes
again.

Come, Lord, come

Response: Let light fill Your world.

Advent Candle Lighting – pdf