poliphilo

If I were a Catholic Christian and not a Quaker (so not necessarily a Christian at all) I would currently be observing the season of Advent.

Advent is all about waiting, anticipating, looking forward- not to Christmas but to something called The Second Coming- which you can interpret as you will.

Buddhists also wait, but for them the waiting is a thing in itself, its own consummation, whereas Christian wait for something....

Huge generalisation coming up: The spirituality of the East is passive, the spirituality of the West active. Both are appropriate to the situation we find ourselves in.

I always loved Advent. For one thing it has the best hymns.

I was in the Meeting House on Thursday and a text came into my head and kept on pestering me until I gave in, picked a Bible off the table, looked it up and then read it aloud to the Friends.

Luke is talking about John the Baptist. The text that was pestering me is "The voice of one crying in the wilderness" and passage in which it is embedded goes like this:

Now in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar.....the word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness. And he came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins- as it is written in the the book of the words of Esias the prophet, saying, "The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth; And all flesh shall see the salvation of God."