Nine Lessons for Advent

The old tradition of a Service of Nine Lessons and Carols helps us to prepare ourselves for Christmas. In that spirit, I have written Nine Lessons as a contemporary way of opening the door to this season and the message hidden within it.

I will publish a new Lesson every few days over the coming four weeks. If you wish to be notified of their arrival, do sign up on the right.

May you be enriched this Advent Season.



First Lesson: Eden

There is a way of reading the old story of Eden in which the Garden is understood not as state in which the world is created but, rather, as a personal gift. Each person is vested with an Eden as they are birthed into the world. Now this is not an infantile fantasy in which the world is reconfigured around our personal paradise. That would be to render ourselves centres of the universe. Rather, to see ourselves as gifted with an Eden is to understand that each person comes into the world as a landscape, fecund and abundant with potential unique to them alone.

Eden is that space which is fitted for our existence. It is the space within which whose boundaries there is sufficient to meet our needs. To be in Eden is to be fully at home, to be at home in our place and time in the world, with a corresponding sense of ease and confidence. It is also to be in a place of trust that the soil contains sufficient to provide for the needs of those who dwell upon it. To be in Eden is to find our scale in the world; neither reaching beyond ourselves nor shying away from our borders. It is to live a fitting, grounded life and in so doing, to live well. For we live well when we fully inhabit the space that is available for us in the world. Those around us sense our ease, dignity and coherence, our weight and stability.

Our lives are acts of discovery, finding what there is within our Eden. The world awaits the fullness of our space, the world awaits the blessing it can bring to others. This Eden gift remains secure whatever neglect or trespass has taken place. Ultimately, the fecundity that lies within it, is too deep to be dug out and discarded by the careless of any other. We can be confident of that. And that confidence must be the bedrock upon which we live in the world.

(c) Simon P Walker 2011