By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann

While fires still rage in our forests and our streets, it is time to start looking towards that season when we slow our bodies down, when we welcome in the darkness, when a single flame is enough. While the work of resistance never ceases, Advent is the liturgical season where we find more time for the quiet, waiting hours to prepare our hearts. Prepare our lives for the transformative power of story and its ability to turn the powers that be upside down. It is time. 

I have a deep love of the Advent season and have helped create a couple of Advent daily reflection books through Radical Discipleship. This year, we are at it again, but have moved over the design and printing to Geez magazine. Geez has put together a daily Advent reflection book guided by many of our regular Radical Discipleship and Geez contributors.

The booklets are at the printers and we will be mailing them out early November in time for the season. So gather your church communities, your prayer circles, your co-workers, or your cat, and get your orders in now.

I think of all the gray skies that my grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents walked under. Ordinary days – each one a treasure. I think of my mother – defiantly in love with unpopular weather. She took joy-filled dreary walks, invited us out into the biting cold laughing, marched into stormy waters for a swim even as lightning cracked. I will never have another quiet, sobering Advent with my mother – but if I slow down enough to cry, I can feel her present – bidding me outdoors to sing with the wind. 

“To Look with Beauty,” Lucia Wylie-Eggert

This is a Field by Kateri Boucher

The books are $15 and you can order them now HERE.