home of st. stephen's online prayer book
[An excerpt from a lectionary reading on this First Sunday of Advent followed by a stanza of a poem that resonated:]
You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. – Romans 13.11
…. It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years
of secret conversing
speaking out loud in the clear air….
[Another passage from our new collection of daily readings:]
The shift from denial of injustice to recognition of injustice can’t be unmade. What your eyes have seen they have seen. Once you see the injustice, you can never again in good faith deny the oppression and defend the oppressor. What was loyalty is now betrayal. From now on, if you don’t resist, you collude. But there is a middle ground between defense and attack, a ground of flexible resistance, a space opened for change. It is not an easy place to find or live in.
— Ursula Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind