From Accepting, we move to Journeying which winds through the season of Advent. From Mary’s emotional journey in accepting the coming of surprising new life, to her physical journeys in Luke’s Gospel to see Elizabeth and with Joseph, surely himself required to map a new terrain; from earth-hurled angels to shepherds travelling away from familiar hillsides, this is a season of movement as well as stillness, inner and outer. And the movement is in new directions, following new demands and impulses, away from the familiar and through the marginal landscape of Advent.
Coming after waiting and accepting, there may be a suggestion that journeying is just ‘the next thing to do.’ But this might be to miss the experience of Advent journeying, and to lose the textured quality of journeying as a movement of soul and spirit, intricately woven around and through the stillness of waiting and the heart-opening moments of accepting. Rather than a thing to do, journeying might be the thread which weaves all these together and a guiding principle helping us to catch a glimpse of how we travel with God through all of our lives.
Perhaps the journey we are making with God, like Mary, is one of travelling as God’s life grows within us; as we cherish and nurture this new life and are in turn, shaped by its fluttering presence. But our way of journeying with God may be utterly different, and lingering thoughtfully over our travelling in God’s presence during this season, may help us to apprehend more fully how we habitually travel with our authoring, shaping, accompanying God. Are we travelling with God or towards God? Are we caught in a paradoxical flight from the God for whom we yearn as in the poet Francis Thompson’s desperate drama of loving pursuit The Hound of Heaven, in which a fleeing soul tries vainly to outpace God’s unhurried grace? Or are we perhaps only recently, and falteringly, recognising our companion on the way, as contemporary Emmaus road travellers, glimpsing God in burning hearts and broken bread? We may be called by the beckoning God of the poet R. S. Thomas, who catches us in His compassionate slipstream, drawing us on, across spaces pregnant with His receding presence, and knowing ourselves and our creator more in the travelling.
Or perhaps we are modern day Canterbury Pilgrims, winding our way through the ordinariness of the world, shaped by life’s demands in all their tragedy and hilarity, but only travelling because of a holy path which guides our feet and gives purpose to our journey. Whatever our mode of journeying, the stops along the way and the punctuations of waiting and accepting, to be called along the Advent journey is to be shaped and to be challenged. It is to be drawn on in love and to know ourselves beloved by the one who is our North Star.
The Revd Dr Carys Walsh is a priest in the Diocese of Peterborough, and formerly taught Christian Spirituality at St Mellitus College, the training college for Anglican clergy. She is the author of Frequencies of God: Walking Through Advent with R S Thomas
The statue was commissioned for the previous Paternoster Square complex in 1975 and was replaced on a new plinth following the redevelopment of Paternoster Square.Sculptor Dame Elizabeth Frink (Thurlow, Suffolk 1930 - Blandford Forum, Dorset 1993), English sculptor and printmaker (Wikipedia).