A winter day on the streets of Berlin, 2022
I have always been drawn to the wording of the Holden prayer I discovered at Friday prayers at St Olaf College. “You send us on ventures … by paths as yet untrodden …”
I feel it is a suitable motto for our Christmas journey. Every year we journey again, searching for Christmas beyond the cultural happenings, and every year again it leads us onto a path untrodden.
Isn’t that how a pilgrimage should be? We walk the same road and yet it becomes a path untrodden. We might walk the same street from Christmas Day to Epiphany but still we experience it as a new path altogether.
And isn’t it also this way that invites us to reconcile our religious forms with the life we live? The forms offer us the road, but we are the ones who must fill it with life every year anew.
And thus, dear pilgrim, each of us will find themselves on a quite different journey, even though we all walk the same path. I am thinking about a fellow traveler who is burying her husband today. Or another who has written about caring for his elderly mother who isn’t who she was a year ago. And also our little family, who is walking this path this year on another continent, meeting different people, having different commitments, living a different life altogether.
And still, we follow the old tale which leads us to the stable.
***
Yesterday we pondered Joseph, the kindred man without whom young Mary and the baby she carried might have gotten lost on the way. And the mindful aspects of our soul who can help us reconcile our father image we have experienced on our way. Today I invite you to ponder the way itself. It is your own way, your own path untrodden.
Become aware of the step you are taking now, as you read. Can you see the next step? Or your most recent footprint? Where are you on your life’s journey? And where is your Bethlehem this year? Where does the Divine want to make its dwelling place this time, on your journey inward?
This is the existential journey underlying every Christmas journey. It is, as Kierkegaard would put it, the Christmas truth “for me.” When we become aware, then the old tales become alive, unfold new meaning, in the present moment. Then a new birth can happen. This is the sacred moment when the eternal breaks into our humble stable, and when we realize the Divine dwelling place right in front of us. Right here, with us holding the newborn child or tending to our aging loved one, right here in the midst of my grief and sorrows, and right here, where my new season of life is unfolding.
This year we spend this season in our monastic home in the mega city of Berlin, and on family visitation, trying to carve out new ways of sacred journeying. I have come back to my homeland and now see it anew. It reminds me of the tale of the two monks leaving their cell in order to find the place of the eternal. They journeyed far and wide, they took on challenge after challenge, they became pilgrims, until, finally, they arrived at an old, ornate door. Here, a voice said, you have arrived at the Divine dwelling place. When they opened the door, they found themselves at home, right in the monastic cell from which they had started.
Was their journey in vain? I don’t think that this is what the tale tries to teach us. Instead, it explains in a parable the experience of seeing anew. We must venture, we must walk the paths untrodden, so that when we arrive home, we do so as renewed beings.
“You are not seeking Christmas. Christmas is seeking you.”
This Advent season our City Cloister invited people on the “Advent path.” The Advent path they designed led visitors on a walking meditation right through the monastery, from the gate via the courtyard to the workshop. From there through the garden into the chapel. And from the chapel many steps up to the meditation room under the roof and further all the way up to the bell tower.
Each place held a station telling part of the Christmas story: Joseph in the carpentry workshop, the shepherds in the garden, the angels singing in the dark chapel, Mary waiting in the meditation room and the holy family welcoming the pilgrim up on the bell tower. I was impressed by how our colleagues had crafted the path and stations — translating the Christmas journey for our own lives.
You do not need to go to Bethlehem, dear pilgrim. You can just walk through the place you are, your home, or the place you are visiting, or wait in the still chamber of your heart. There you can unfold the Christmas story, God with us. Or better still, simply wait. You can wait until the Christmas story reveals itself.
Open your eyes and you will find it, Joseph, the care taker, who protects the sacred seed, Mary, the soulful, who walks pregnant with it, the angels who sing in the dark, and the startled shepherds who follow them along.
So, dear pilgrim, stop today and wait with an open heart for Christmas to find you where you are and as you are.
With love, Almut
Practice
For your walking meditation through your interior home we provide you with some scenes from our monastery’s Advent path. May it guide you to the place you need to be :-)
This post is part of our 12 Days of Christmas Series 2022/23: “Taking Courage”, a Contemplative Journey towards the heart of Christmas. To enter our virtual dwelling place click here. To share your thoughts with us, write us here. We love to hear from you! For personal guidance visit our PathFinder.
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Peace and Blessings, Almut & Chuck