Advent Reflections
Each day in Advent, you will receive an email from St. Barnabas with words and images to invite your engagement with the season’s themes of longing and hope, preparation and expectation, listening and silence. Many of the images will not be traditional “religious” art. Advent calls us to notice the signs of God in unexpected places.
 
We invite you to prayerfully contemplate the images and absorb the words. Consider returning to them at various times during the day, letting them speak into the moment. Perhaps you will hear a word meant just for you.  

December 5th, 2019
Chris Marker, Passengers , 2008-2010.
Chris Marker, Passengers , 2008-2010.
Chris Marker, Passengers , 2008-2010.
Chris Marker’s photographs of passengers on the Paris Metro perfectly illustrate a line from W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio : “What is real about us all is that each of us is waiting.” The words are spoken by a shepherd in the fields of Bethlehem, just before the angels announces the birth of the Savior. Another shepherd replies, “But one day or the next we shall hear the Good News.”

Then all the shepherds recite a chorus together:

Then who is the Unknown
Who answers for our fear
As if it were His own,
So that we reply
Till the day we die:
‘No, I don’t know why,
But I’m glad I’m here’?

Chris Marker, Passengers , 2008-2010.