Daily Signet

I confess—I love Advent calendars. While daytimers systematically divide the year, months, and days into boxes of time, Advent calendars hide each day’s “window of surprise” within an endless variety of themes and scenes. Boxed time seems to demand an accounting for time spent; Advent windows remind you of the hidden potentia and wonder awaiting in each new day. More a palette for the human imagination than a ledger sheet of time, the Advent window offers a prompt for the human soul to absorb and en-joy what the day will bring: the comings and goings of colors and vestments and scents and tastes and moods of the season.  

Advent calendars remind you that there’s more to a day than 15 minute intervals; and that not all days are created equal. Some days gather up more than a 24-hour share of time, filled as they are with all the excitement of preparations as you head for sacred moments around a tree, or lighting candles at an altar, or joining with family and friends around a table laden with favorite foods. Then, there are windows that open up to scenes that remind you to relax the gathering stitch of time in quiet and patient moments of reflection as you await the birth of a child in a manger. 

Every year I’m tempted to hide all my daytimers and pull out all the Advent calendars I can find—and to count my days with these windows of surprise that open up into kairos, allowing that which is timeless, all believed and all beloved, to pour into and fill all my chronos days.                                                                                                                                               

Teri Martin

On This Day…

St. Barbara: 4C virgin who refused her father’s order that she marry, and retreated into a tower. Father had her tortured, then took her himself up into the mountains where he killed her and burned her body

Rainer Maria Rilke born 12-4-1875 in Prague, Czechoslovakia: poet and novelist known for his Letters to A Young Poet, the Duino Elegies, and Sonnets to Orpheus. Died 12-29-1926
Quotes: “Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”
“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it: blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches, for the Creator, there is no poverty.”
“A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them – they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship.”