Last Sunday, the Dayspring community blessed the opening of Earthen Hands, a pottery studio near the old farmhouse. It used to be a lawnmower shed, with the usual accumulation of machines, broken tools and extra parts. Now it’s clean, with two new windows and neat working spaces around Bud Wilkinson’s old kick-wheel – a gift from the art program at New Community Church, returned to Dayspring for this new purpose. Jean Brown will be hosting this “spirit space” whenever she can.
Clay has been Jean’s spiritual guide for many years now. “It’s not about a product,” she said, “but the process of discovery, of being a beginner again and again. I want to make this space accessible to anyone who visits Dayspring.” In her own way, Jean was inviting us to the wilderness, where hand and heart must open to what is there: earth and air, fire and water. Clay carries all of that and more.
Like John the Baptist in our gospel text for this second Sunday of Advent,* Jean was inviting us to repent (although those were surely NOT the words she used), to turn away from the rigidities of known roles and responsibilities in order to be open to newness, to what is unnamed and as yet unformed in us. She was literally inviting us to new life!
The text in Luke begins with a list of rulers to anchor what follows in time and space: the reign of Emperor Tiberius; Pontius Pilate, governor of Judea; Herod, ruler of Galilee; when Annas and Caiaphas were high priests at the Temple. The names and titles convey the institutional setting and power structures in which the message of John must have sounded hopelessly small and simple.
John’s message, which came straight from the prophet Isaiah, sounds like the way clay is made: fill in the valleys, bring the mountains low, straighten the crooked and make the rough places smooth. When we work with clay, we are holding this ancient weathering process in our hands, just as we hold the direction of our lives in our hands. My friend, M.C. Richards, wrote in her book Centering, “It is not pots we are forming, but ourselves.” I will be offering more quotes from her book for your Advent reflections
this week.
As we step into this second week of Advent, let us find a quiet spot away from the daily demands for performance and listen for John’s invitation to let the wilderness work on us from inside, to make the clay of our lives pliable again, ready for what is about to be born.
-Marjory Zoet Bankson, Seekers Church
*Luke 3:1-6
- What are the names or titles that represent your identity and responsibilities? How do they keep you from being new and unformed?
- What can you do to become more pliable, ready for change?
- Where will you find support for this “unproductive” time?
