Nobody knows what time of year Jesus was actually born.

But we in our climate zone enter the season of wakefulness and watchfulness – Advent –the time of year when the energy of trees has been drawn down into the roots.  After catching photons from the sun all summer, broadleaf trees drop their photosynthesizers, and depend on the life and energy already inside them to sustain them through the winter months.

It’s a season of interiority.  Or, at least, it’s a season in which we are invited to pay careful attention to the life and energy within us.

In this sense, we are all Mary this time of year.  We were foolish enough to say ‘Yes,’ and now we’re pregnant with something we barely understand.  It’s growing in there, and it wants out eventually.  It is both you and not-you.  It is for you, and ultimately for the world.  I have no idea what it’s like to be pregnant, but Advent gives me a hint.

Raimon Panikkar refers to Christ as “the deepest interiority of all of us, the abyss in which, in each one of us, there is a meeting between the finite and the infinite, the material and spiritual, the cosmic and the divine” (Christophany, p. 189).

Paying attention to the interior doesn’t mean we go into hibernation mode.  It’s a good season to notice what kind of energy it is that is motivating us and propelling our actions.  Are we driven by fear?  By love?  What is the source of our confused living?  What is the source that will sustain us?

Our Advent worship theme is Drawn to the Heart of God.  It speaks to the ultimate interior of Reality to which we are being drawn.