Those moments of awareness, when our attention is drawn, when we see what we are looking at for the reality that it is; moments of what? Revelation? Epiphany? Summons? Attentiveness?
Each of these singularly or in combination, perhaps.
We were out walking recently in what used to be a forest, but following Storm Arwen, is now deforested ground covered with tree stumps, and disfigured further by the track scars of heavy machinery.
I remember it as a quiet mature forest, rich in bird life, with a network of paths giving a choice of direction, length and scenery. One winter morning we stood in it watching goldcrest wrens feeding on the ground and high in the trees.
But out walking the other day on the surviving paths, navigating machine tracks so deep they were flooded ditches after the recent flood-inducing rainfall, the land both looked and felt desolate.
Until I turned round. The sun was settling over Clachnaben, the sky like backlit Lalique. The hazy light and the layered landscape in the distance, was in stark contrast to the several square miles of dull dankness in close proximity around us.
The photo was taken from Garlogie, 21 miles away from Clachnaben. I had turned back to do a 360 degree survey. And away over there, the sun.
Isaiah is full of such moments. Light shining in darkness, the first finger line traces of dawn, the blazing radiance of the light of the nations. And the locus classicus of Advent hope:
"The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned." (Isaiah 9.2)
That moment when you turn round and are made to see that life is backlit by the heavens, and the surrounding gloom of life's landscape is part of a world where light carries its own promise of luminous hope.
The horizontal layers of horizons, bathed in filtered sunlight, become a sacrament of the present moment, signalling an encounter with a Presence that intersects with the world, and touches into our own inner world of faith and longing, hope and uncertainty, love and loss.
Maybe Advent faith is the unexplained urge to turn round and face the sun; and then to open ourselves to the God who is light. "Arise! Shine! Your light has come!" Such a moment of turning is hard to explain. What moves us to turn? What enables us to see what we are looking at? The Advent answer is as old as the human longing: "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given..."
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