Lately, many of us are sensing the world differently. The land feels more alive, the night more spacious and the wind more articulate. Even time itself seems to have slowed just enough for us to notice that we are not standing alone in the present moment, but at the meeting place of many moments at once.
It is as though something long held in quiet memory is beginning to breathe again.
The Christian tradition has a name for this kind of remembering: anamnesis. It is not simply the recollection of past events. It is the past made present, active and living now. It is the kind of remembering that does not trap us in what has been, but roots us more deeply in what is.
This is the remembering that shapes the heart of Advent.
Advent is a season of waiting, for sure but it is not an empty waiting. It is a waiting full of memory and promise, where the long faithfulness of God begins to gather itself once more into flesh, breath, and light.
We are not only waiting for Christ to come, we are learning how to recognise where Christ has always been.
In these dark weeks of the year the soul naturally turns inward. The days shorten and the evenings draw us closer to hearth and lamp, and the land itself seems to rest. It is precisely in this resting that something in us becomes receptive again — no longer strained toward productivity, but softened into attentiveness.
The old Celtic tradition understood this instinctively. Prayer was never separated from place, nor faith from season. The world itself was a text to be read — through frost and flame, storm and stillness, seedtime and harvest. Creation was not a backdrop to spiritual life rather it was its very language.
Perhaps this is why Advent still works upon us so quietly and so powerfully. It aligns the human heart once more with the wider rhythms of the earth and the deeper rhythms of God.
And so we wait in the dark but not because God is absent from us, rather because God is hidden in the way a seed is hidden — in preparation and in readiness to appear when the time is come.
There are seasons when the past begins to feel strangely near, not in any nostalgic sense, but as depth. As if our lives are being gently drawn back into a story that did not begin with us, and will not end with us. We sense that we are carried by hands both older and wider than our own small histories. This is not about turning backward, it's more about being grounded.
Advent grounds us again in the long memory of God — a memory that has travelled through generations, wildernesses, exiles, songs and silences, carrying light through darkness without ever failing.
And now we find ourselves here again, on the edge of another Christmas, standing in the dark with only a small flame trembling in our hands.
We do not yet see clearly, but we do feel that something is already stirring.
Perhaps Advent is not only about waiting for the Light.
Perhaps it is about learning to recognise where the Light has been quietly glowing all along — in us, in the land beneath our feet, and in the hidden places of the world.