Many call this season Advent. It’s about something happening and yet not completely here; knowing something good which has been promised will come.
We know things are not completely as they should be, but we can imagine something better. At times like Christmas we tend to close off disturbing circumstances and fantasize a perfect, abundant, good-feeling world, if only for Christmas Day.
Billions of us feel the troubling conditions and yet, in our discontent we hold an image, a sense of an ideal love and peace that could be. Though it is like only a seed in our hearts, we can say that somehow it is part of a verdant forest coming. Evidence of its reality is that we can say it in the middle of the troubles.
If you cannot say it, I am saying it here and you can keep re-reading it. We have not stopped moving toward this hope.
We hope
Hold fulfillment in imagination
Not materiality;
For the coming
For the growth
Always receiving it
Recognizing slightly
What has come
Allowing in hindsight
What we have received
Aware of incompleteness
Realizing more to come
Arriving moment by moment
Knowing we will arrive
Thankful thus far
Glad there will be
Creation expanding
Represented, not known
What we shall be
For Christmas I made a book with this poem and image in it along with 15 others. Entitled Marking the Journey: holding the past, reaching ahead, the book is meant to awaken hope in more hearts.
To get one of the first copies at reduced price, click the donate button below and fill in $15, or donate more to sustain this non-profit arts ministry.
