Mtr Taylor Devine

Dear Friend,

This month we are reflecting on, learning about, and praying with the “Rest” component of the Way of Love. The rule of life that has been proposed by our Presiding Bishop includes this important element of a Christian life, and invites us to discover what rest might do in our lives of prayer and service. I have been pondering what other words should go with "rest," am I resting in Christ, I am resting with God, are we resting for something or from something? Rest as a spiritual practice automatically brings to mind Sabbath and the Lord's day.

Honoring rest as a spiritual practice makes room for a few things:
-Making time and space for Church and the community activity that comes with it.

-The centrality of the Exodus narrative in our understanding of God’s saving work. When Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt God made a new covenant with the people through the Ten Commandments, reminding them that they are not work-bots nor slaves, but are made in the image of the living God who rested on the 7th day of creation.

-Everyone needs to rest, just like everyone needs to eat, pray, work, laugh, enjoy, struggle. We need these things physically and God honors humanity by creating sacred patterns of work and rest even in the pattern of the first creation. 

-More than physically needing rest, without it we assume that we are somehow going to save ourselves. The pattern of rest reminds us to trust God and God’s ability to bring our broken creation to restoration and fullness.

So why focus on rest in this season of Advent? Perhaps one way to look at it is we have just a few weeks to prepare for Jesus, God-with-us, God-incarnate. The saving work of his birth and life and death and rising again is the center of the salvation story and we are offered this grace through God's work, not ours. Resting in that knowledge shifts our mental furniture.

In this season I noticed that every antiphon, the short prayers before and after the Invitatory Psalm in Morning Prayer, ends with "Come let us adore him." Not just the Advent antiphons, but every one throughout the year and in each season. Our calling to worship God with both our lips and our lives is buoyed by the various practices of faith, and rest cannot be ignored as one of them. It is is quiet that a prayer springing up can make us jump.

Our God, the one described in the following creative and majestic and all-powerful way in today's reading, hallowed rest. Come, let us adore him.

The one who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea, and pours them out on the surface of the earth, the Lord is his name. (Amos 5:8)

In Christ,
Mtr Taylor 

For the next two Wednesday night Mosaic Dinners (December 11 and 18) please join us to hear from the Beloved in the Desert community members about the Christian practice of Rest from 6:30-7:30pm following Confession (5pm), Stations of the Cross (5:30pm), and dinner (6pm.) Nursery care and other formation opportunities are provided. Mosaic will not gather on December 25 or January 1 but will resume on the 8th.