MEDITATION on O

"Meditation on 'O'" by Troy's Work Table. Sanctuary of Christ Episcopal Church, Tacoma, Washington.

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This morning I participated in "Come to the Light," the 2018 Advent Quiet Morning at Christ Episcopal Church of Tacoma, Washington. It was a morning of worship with Holy Communion, followed by three priest-led devotions on the O Antiphons with time for mediation, reflection, and prayer after each devotion.

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I so needed this. Right now. This morning.

It was a time and place of quiet and stillness. A time of poetry and prayer. A place of counterculture carved out in the midst of capitalism and chaos.

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The first devotion was on the letter "O" as both exclamation and as simple letter. It was about the O of yearning. The notion expressed in the German term Sehnsucht. The knowledge that we are created with the capacity to yearn and that we yearn for communion with God, the divine, our Creator.

In the midst of distractions, we seek, yearn, long. We engage in a refusal of manufacture happiness.

The first devotion ended in a lectio divina reading of a poem from Malcolm Guite's book Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas, Epiphany.

"O Memory of time, reminding me, / My Ground of Being, always grounding me / ... / Come to me now, disguised as everything."

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I spent the time after the first devotions taking photographs of Os and circles I found in the Sanctuary. They were present in the racking of overhead lights, in stained glass windows, in offering plates, in loaves of communion bread. I also wrote poems based upon the notion of O, the antiphons, the yearning of Sehnsucht, the death of pets. Rilke's Duino Elegies were never far from my thoughts.

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For me, it was a time of devotion and meditation upon image.

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Then the priest arrived and rang the bell calling us back to the Chapel.