People
of God: be glad!
Your
God delights in you,
giving
you joy for sadness
and
turning the dark to light.
Be
strong in hope therefore;
for
your God comes to save.
You
are God’s children.
Lord,
make us one in the love of Christ
today
and for ever.
Amen.
Joy
for sadness. Turning the dark to light.
There’s
a heart-breaking thing that English people do in times of sadness: they say of
their circumstances, “Well, you just have to remember, there’s others who are
worse off.” It sounds pious, but it is a false and empty humility, producing neither
any compassion for those others, nor even a shred of self-compassion. We all
experience sadness, darkness; at times unbearable, either because it is
universally beyond bearing alone (say, the death of a child) or because it is a
small thing that happens to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
The
hope of Advent is not that God will exempt us from life in the fullness of its
reality, but that the Sovereign Lord of the Universe has decreed and still upholds
that the world keep turning, from night to new day, from sadness to joy.
No comments:
Post a Comment