Mid Advent, Midweek Journaling

At church, a group of us had talked about creating a regular series of Advent gatherings where we could be creative together.  As we compared schedules, it was clear that we would only be able to get together one day during Advent.  We decided that one day was better than no days, and we agreed to meet on Wednesday, December 11, at 6:00.

Thanks to Facebook, I realized that there was a meditative journaling guided exercise (4 modules of them) in the December issue of Gather magazine, an exercise created by Vonda Drees, the same woman who led the online journaling group that was so profound for me at the end of 2018.  In the interest of time, we did one of the modules in the article.

I had had a vision of something larger, with a series of stations and all sorts of images, but in the end, I didn't have time to create that, and in a way, it didn't matter.  We only had about 45 minutes, so I'm not sure why I thought I needed to create something grand and big.

Last night I arrived at the church to discover that someone had left the lights burning on the trees--they're electric lights on fake trees so it didn't matter.  It was lovely, but we couldn't do a journaling exercise in the dark sanctuary.

We began by reading Isaiah 2:  1-5.  The meditation had us draw a high mountain and then make dots leading up to it.

Halfway through, we read the verses again, listening for words or images that leapt out at us.  Then we drew dots, thinking about the word as we made each dot.  My word was instruction:

I was intrigued by how different our images were.

One woman wrote the part of the verse that she wanted to be sure to preserve, the part that spoke to her:  "He'll show us the way to work, so that we can live the way we're made."

We had a bit of time for sharing, which was lovely.  The four of us gathered together have known each other for many years, so we were inclined to share.  It would have also been fine with me if we had just sat together in silence at the end.


My spouse came for choir rehearsal.  He had his mandolin.  As we talked about our images, he rehearsed "Go Tell It on the Mountain."  He swears he didn't realize we were sketching mountains, and I believe him.

I went back to turn off the lights so that we could all experience the loveliness I got to see when I was the first to arrive.  One of the journaling group caught the moment of video (you'll have to turn the volume way up to hear the mandolin):

As the choir gathered for choir rehearsal, we returned to our other tasks.  Like so much of my life, gathering together to journal was something I didn't know I desperately needed until I had done it.