Sunday 29th November - First Sunday of Advent - at home

 

Once again Angela Almond is hosting a 'Pause for Advent' on her blog called 'Tracing Rainbows.

Only this time, when we are all 'paused' anyway, she is calling it Advent - at home.

I'm a member of a facebook group which joins together to read a book at Lent and Advent; this year the book is based on poems by R S Thomas, and the reflections written by Carys Walsh

Today's poem is

  The Coming 

And God held in his hand
A small globe.  Look he said.
The son looked.  Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour.  The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, A river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
               On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky.  many People
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs.  The son watched
Them.  Let me go there, he said.

I had already copied this into my 'Commonplace Book' some months ago, when I first read it. 

As I read this poem today, this time it occurred to me that if the Father and the Son and the Spirit are one God in three persons, then the person looking down at the Earth, and saying at the end 'Let me go there,' is God the Father himself. And the Spirit. And the Word, made flesh, (incarnate). All the Trinity, all at the same time, come down on a rescue mission.