December 1, 2024
Today is the First Sunday of Advent. Advent is a time of waiting for Christians, but it’s not like waiting for a bus, for dinner, or for a traffic-light to change, where you’re counting the seconds, checking your phone, or glancing impatiently at the dash-board clock. Advent’s waiting is actually a good sort of waiting. “Advent” means “the Coming,” and what we’re waiting for is Christ.
This is a time of spiritual preparation, in which we’re invited to step aside from the world momentarily, and look for a peaceful spot inside ourselves, where we can sit and let the expectation of peace and the presence of love grow in our hearts.
Tonight we light the first candle in our wreath, and this candle is called “Hope.”
[Excerpt from BOOK 10 (Untitled), Copyright © 2024 Diana Gabaldon]
We kept the future as people keep the past—small details, a breath of air scented with fresh gasoline and the exotic shadowed glasses painted with cacti (both given out as premiums at desert service-stations), clothes-hangers tangled in the closet, caught in the act of reproduction. Artifacts, and the wider things, newscasts, newspapers, radio and television, the layer of outer events that wrapped the personal experiences of the body.
You keep things among your family. Shared history—remember when…? And yet you can’t (can you?) keep the other times, the other places, wholly safe among you. The currents of the present are too strong, they sweep away the tender things of the past, leaving only those with a limpet’s grim hard grip upon your heart.
Displaced people live as pearls—you have a place to cling to, but not your place—and yet you create another layer, the nacre of the present overlying the wounds of the past, the core of self held safe, glowing in the depths of mind and heart.
Click to visit my Book Ten webpage for information on this book, and to read more excerpts from it.
This excerpt was posted on December 1, 2024 on this webpage and on my official Facebook page.