Advent devotional for December 5th

The ancient abbey on Iona (Scotland)

"Like cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country." - Proverbs 25:25

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"I learn by going where I have to go."

Theodore Roethke, The Waking

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Throughout the world are sacred places to which people have set out on pilgrimage. Often they are places of profound stillness which offer the traveller an opportunity for contemplation, whist others are places of joy and noisy celebration. What it is that makes the pilgrim journey is known only to the individual human heart. But the call to set out, when it is heard, is unmistakable.

'A place of hope,' they say, and in their thousands they journey, year by year, to this tiny island on the margins of Europe. Sunswept and windswept, yet always deeply a place of transformation. We need you, with your alternative vision, with your ever present questions, your often uncomfortable silence. For you are a place of prayer, of Christ's abiding; holding together the frayed threads of our fleeting devotion, opening a path for healing and for peace. Not momentary healing nor easy faith, but struggle, commitment and a continuing conversation. (Peter Millar, writing of Iona)

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+Lord of the pilgrim soul, nourish us with glimpses of those places where healing, reconciliation and peace are to be found. Amen.

(St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 2005 Advent Devotional)