Words of Light and Hope from Helena Crockford LLM.

Words of Light and Hope

17th December 2023 

Helena Crockford LLM

John the Baptist cried out: I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness ‘Make straight the way of the Lord’. John 1.22

This third Sunday of Advent is called Rose or Gaudete (Rejoice) Sunday.  The pink candle on the Advent Wreath is lit to mark the mid-point in this season of expectant waiting.  

The priest William Vanstone wrote a classic Christian book ‘The Stature of Waiting’ (1982). He contrasted this stillness and hope with our human tendency for busyness and activity – perhaps never more true than in the ‘run up’ to Christmas!  Maybe these words, describing what wonder and depth can come from waiting in stillness, can encourage us to do so more (p.112): 

‘To man, as he waits, the world discloses its power of meaning – discloses itself in its heights and its depths, as wonder and terror, as blessing and threat. Man becomes, so to speak, the sharer with God of a secret – the secret of the world’s power of meaning. The world is for him no mere succession of images recorded and registered in the brain: it is what Blake saw in his tiger and Kant in the starry heavens – a wonderful terror or a terrifying wonder. Rarely does man rise to such intense receptivity; but even in quite ordinary moments he becomes a point at which something in the world is not only registered but understood, experienced, recognised.  Because man is in the world there are points in the world at which things no longer merely exist but are understood, appreciated, welcomed, feared, felt. Man as he waits upon the world becomes a place where the world is received not as it is received by a camera or a tape-recorder but rather with the power of meaning with which it is received by God.’