Advent Sunday

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, the threshold of a season and a time for anticipation and reflection. To me this is a beautiful time of the year, a time fit for beautiful words and thoughts, words that, put together, will illustrate some of the emotional and symbolic gravity of the days ahead. The most beautiful words I have read concerning this season is put into a poem by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and a very fine poet. I have a profound respect and admiration for Dr. Williams, both as a priest and as a poet, two roles he himself adamantly insists on keeping separate. The poem in question is Advent Calendar, published in The Poems of Rowan Williams, reprinted in 2002 by Perpetua Press.

Advent Calendar

He will come like last leaf's fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud's folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

Nativity scene by Sandro Botticelli