The First Sunday of Advent dawns in mist, a cold damp day. No snow softens the grim greyness of earth, river, sky. Geese, ducks have flown. Birdsong no longer blesses the air.
Inside my cottage, no Advent Wreath of green boughs, planted with purple candles, stands ready to light the darkness that will descend with early evening.

Living in a Universe whose beginning is still visible in deep space, knowing that what Teilhard de Chardin calls the Christic Presence, the Love at the heart of the Universe, has been here from the first moment in time, makes Advent seem to me superfluous. Why imagine a world awaiting the birth of Love? I stay away from ritual celebrations that open the four weeks of Advent.

At mid-day, I open my computer, tune into the live streaming of a panel led by Jean Houston on “Living in Cosmic Consciousness”.
“We are the microcosm of the macrocosm of consciousness,” Jean says. “We are called to implant the new codings for an emerging spirituality. We are encoded with the Universe Herself…”

Something new, yet old and very familiar is rising in me. A sense of call, an eagerness, an excitement, a knowing that something wonderful is about to happen, and that I /we /all of us are called to bring it to birth…

The day moves on. I sit by the fire, writing in my journal, as the windows of my cottage slowly fill with darkness. Is that when it happens? A remembering, a knowing that is as old as my first memory of Christmas, and yet suddenly new. The story of a young pregnant woman making an uncomfortable journey to a strange town. She does not know where, how, when she will give birth.

This is Advent.

And you and I are being called to be Mary in our time, to give birth to “an emerging spirituality”. Not knowing the where or how or when of it. But eager as she must have been, to see the new life.

What was the moment in time when we agreed to this? Do we resonate with the way poet John O’donohue imagines Mary’s moment in time?

Cast from afar before the stones were born
And rain had rinsed the darkness for colour,
The words have waited for the hunger in her
To become the silence where they could form.

The day’s last light frames her by the window,
A young woman with distance in her gaze,
She could never imagine the surprise
That is hovering over her life now.

The sentence awakens like a raven,
Fluttering and dark, opening her heart
To nest the voice that first whispered the earth
From dream into wind, stone, sky and ocean.

She offers to mother the shadow’s child;
Her untouched life becoming wild inside.

Where does our story touch Mary’s? Where are the meeting points? What are the words waiting for the hunger in us “to become the silence where they could form”? When our hearts open, will they also become a nest for a new birthing of the Holy?

From Jean Houston, I have learned that the urgent needs of our time require a “yes” to the conception, followed by the birthing, of newness.

Reflecting upon the call of Mary, the call that is like our own, Jean writes:

Just think of the promise, the potential, the divinity in you, which you have probably disowned over and over again because it wasn’t logical, because it didn’t jibe, because it was terribly inconvenient (it always is), because it didn’t fit conventional reality, because… because… because….
What could be more embarrassing than finding yourself pregnant with the Holy Spirit? It’s a very eccentric, inconvenient thing to have happen.
(Jean Houston in Godseed p. 38)

Eccentric. Inconvenient. Perhaps. But nonetheless it is our call. Mary’s story gives us the courage to say “yes” without knowing where that “yes” may lead. It is enough to know with certainty that our own life will become, like Mary’s, “wild inside”.