Pick up your boat... origami for paddlers and Advent musings

Saturday morning was a 0445 start as I left home to head toward Port Philip Bay and Ricketts Point for the annual Ricketts Red-Eye Christmas Paddle and BBQ Breakfast!  About two dozen members of the Victorian Sea Kayak Club (VSKC) headed off at 0600 into a 10-12kt southerly and tracked toward Mordiallic in the early dawn's light.  A quartering breeze and sea kept things interesting and I couldn't help but reflect on the difference now from 4-5 years ago when I was still struggling to stay upright in my newly built Night Heron Kayak... Learning to paddle in a narrow (50cm) craft was a steep learning curve with many wet-exits as proof!  I have grown to love the evocative lines and sensuous sheer with its lightening fast downwind speed.  Staying upright is no longer a problem, and "rotary cooling" by rolling no longer an involuntary mishap but rather a delightful interlude and a welcome stretcher of lower back muscles.

President Bob trying Oru for size

A friend, Peter, brought along his new toy to show us.  A new take on a folding kayak by a company Oru    All packs up in a shoulder bag and only weighs less than 14kg.  Amazing!

Meanwhile, back out on the water, and turning for home, several of us raised our small sails and enjoyed the enhanced challenge of staying upright in sloppy 1m seas and a fresh breeze.  Cats Paws across the water give watchful sailors warning of impending changes and increase in breeze as the apparent wind heads you and then backs again with renewed strength.  Even a kayak sailor with not much more than a square metre sail needs to be wary of the gusts - the invisible manifests itself in the visible as the narrow Iqyak heels in the breeze.

Yesterday on the first Sunday in Advent  I spoke from a well-known passage from the prophet Isaiah as he delivered words of hope and promise to his people - words that still resonant in our world today...

This is what Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem:

 In the last days

the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established
    as the highest of the mountains;
it will be exalted above the hills,
    and all nations will stream to it.

 Many peoples will come and say,

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
    to the temple of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
    so that we may walk in his paths.”
The law will go out from Zion,
    the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He will judge between the nations
    and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
    and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
    nor will they train for war anymore.

 Come, descendants of Jacob,
    let us walk in the light of the Lord.

This First Sunday finds us as an Advent community brimming with confidence. The light of the world is coming in Jesus Christ, and the world will be transformed. We light the candles of Advent as a foretaste of the light that is to come in the Christ child. The darkness of the world will not prevail. Conflict is replaced by community, and those who would oppose the advent of God’s reign will be judged and overcome. God’s light will not be denied. The reign of God will come.

However hard it may be to believe that a new and longed-for reality will take hold some day, there is power in walking in God’s light now, one step at a time. We may feel cynical or hopeless about the prospects of Isaiah’s vision, but in his invitation lies enormous and practical power. The future belongs to God, but the first step toward that future belongs to those who have glimpsed God’s light and are willing to trust that enough light lies ahead.

We may delight in... an awareness of the presence of God in the ordinary things of life: the delight of an early dawn paddle and the company of good friends...

But for the seers and prophets of Israel their world was the world of dreams, of visions of silence... of trying to make sense of the great " I AM", of Holiness, of Worship... of this God who promises to be present to and for God’s people...

Reading Frederick Buechner's 'Alphabet of Grace' reminded me that we can catch a glimpse sometimes in dreams themselves, the shadowy acting out against an inner landscape of some hidden desire (or last nights curry!), some half-forgotten scrap from our past, some intuition and then we awake, to be challenged and perhaps transformed by the little of what we have learned about who we are or might be, to incarnate the dream, to give hands and feet to a mystery.

Or out of silence when prayer happens... waking at night when the silence in your room is no deeper than the silence in yourselves because for a moment all thought is stilled and you forget who you are or where you are and then out of this silence the prayer comes – O Thou – out of silence and addressed to silence, then returning to silence... the unmistakable sense of presence, the invisible manifests itself in the visible.... and we are challenged by the sense of promise... of what is to come.

Advent proposes impossibilities. The fitting first response is bafflement. The season keeps giving us cause to blurt out the question of Mary: “How can this be?” (Luke 1:34).

We are in the presence of a mystery. God’s own justice and peace will occur among the nations “in days to come.”  What days?  How?

Perhaps all we can say is that the vision describes what God is, in fact, at work in the world to do. It is what Jesus apparently meant by “the reign of God,” which is already present and at work among us, though not yet in fullness. We saw it in Jesus, who converted fear to love, lunacy to sanity, enemies to friends. He died surrounded by swords; a spear stabbed him; nails tore him. They entered infinite love, which “melted them into light.”

” God’s future casts its gleam into the present. We move toward God’s future by making our choices—personal, relational, political, communal—in its light. We move toward God's future by living out the reality of Jesus’ life in us, transforming us.

**  At St. Louis University is a small Jesuit chapel that is creatively lit. The light fixtures are made of twentieth-century cannon shells, converted. Emptied of their lethal contents, they now hold light for people to pray by. In such light we pray and live. And having laid our own weapons down, we bear witness to the promise of greater transformations in days to come.

In the end, what Isaiah offers is not only a vision of global transformation, but an invitation to live toward that day.

“O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD!”