While light emerging in darkness is perhaps the most familiar Advent motif, Mary’s pregnancy in preparation for giving birth is a part of Advent I ponder often, too — even as a woman who has never given birth. At this moment draws near, Mary must drop everything to give her attention to act of giving birth, of bringing forth a being who is not herself (though she too now has a mission which has caught up her own life in ways she cannot fathom). Continue Reading
Month: December 2011
Time & the Ancestors
Yesterday on my birthday I attended a physics lecture with a friend who’s a creative writer (poetry, a novel in the works). The lecture was about this year’s Nobel Prize winners’ discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, not decreasing.
It was satisfying to think for a ‘time’ of the immensity of the universe, about the invisible presence of dark matter and dark energy that may together account for about 96% of the universe. And even oddly satisfying — because true — to think of our planet’s destiny of extinction, when our sun grows old and expands, then contracts into a white dwarf.
Do you think it makes our lives seem to matter less, to set our lives in the context of the universe and its history? Continue Reading
Benedictine Oblate Musings 