Do you know what you are?
You are a manuscript of a divine letter.
You are a mirror reflecting a noble face.
This universe is not outside of you.
Look inside yourself;
everything that you want,
you are already that.
— Rumi

This Advent I have once again been participating in an online retreat with the amazing artist, poet and author Jan L. Richardson. Five days a week an email arrives at some point of the wee hours of the night with an image and words of her creation. Of all the writers I read, Jan expresses Advent better than anyone. Her ability to weave the hopes and dreams of darkness and light always astound me and have me shaking my head “Yes!”…..that is what I felt and was searching for words to say.

One particular phrase in today’s reading struck with a thud to the solar plexus…..”cultivate a mindfulness of mystery.” Lovely, isn’t it? So often and with loud insistence we are urged to cultivate a mindfulness of certainty. But not mystery. Mystery is often shunned for what we can point to as fact, as documentation, as a way of creating an often false sense of order that brings a momentary peace but rarely lasts. There always seems to be the next urgent thing that requires the same Xcel spread sheet approach to life.

But cultivating a mindfulness of mystery, in my opinion, gets us to the heart of what it means to be human. Mystery is at the center of all that really matters. Life. Love. Compassion. Hope. Death. Eternity. The list goes on. Mystery is also at the heart of those places on which we hang our hats of faith. While we may want to twist and turn the ‘facts’ to fit our ordering of faith, Mystery always has the final word.

Which brings me to the words above of Rumi, blessed Rumi. In Advent we speak so often of waiting and watching. We say it as if there is something that is outside that will arrive to make all things, what? Better? Fulfilled? Enlightened? Perfect? Rumi and other wise ones from all the households of faith, impress that everything we need is already present in us. It is a matter of waking up to it, of noticing its nudging presence, its patient warmth, its ability to wait out our human flailing.

Perhaps that is one gift of these darkest of days…..to hold gently and with reverence what is yet unborn in us. Present yet unborn. Everything we want, we are already that. It may be covered over with years of hurt and pain and despair. It may be buried in messages we have harbored, handed out by people who carried their own hurts. The seeds may have been lying dormant until now. Until now.

Today is a good day, a day that has never been before and will never be again. It is a perfect day to cultivate a mindfulness of mystery. Who knows what could happen? Who knows what might be born that only you can offer to the world?

Who knows?