The global online spiritual website, Sacred Space, presents an Advent retreat with a difference, beginning on 1st December, the First Sunday in Advent.
The journey we make from birth to death and rebirth has been made over and over again for countless millennia. Nobody can make it for us, even though countless people have made it before us. While only I can walk my own journey, I do not need to walk alone. In any journey, it helps to have a guide.
The Bible provides us with a large and varied company of those who made the salvation journey before us and who have much to teach us. Every day this Advent, you are invited to make a journey through the unknown in the company of one of these, including Christ, Abraham, Moses, Jonah, Jacob, Nicodemus, Job, Elijah, Mary Magdalene, and the unknown woman who washed the feet of Jesus in the house of Simon the Pharisee.
More recent sources of inspiration include Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Ávila, St John of the Cross, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and CS Lewis. What all their journeys have in common is that they each feature a crisis, in the original meaning of the Greek word, “turning point”- something to be welcomed rather than feared, something that the philosopher Ivan Illich described, as “the marvellous moment when people become aware of their self-imposed cages, and of the possibility of a different life.”
Access this retreat and a host of other online advent resources, including daily prayer, music and poetry, at: www.newpilgrimpath.ie.