In Advent we anticipate – with hope, ache and longing – some refreshed or renewed experience of divine presence in our hearts, in our lives. It is a time when we return to scripture’s birth stories of Jesus because they have a ‘thin place’ quality to them. We return to the beginning when the promise of divine presence seems strongest, brightest, purest. We start at the beginning so that we might also begin again. This season we turn to the beginning verses of John’s Gospel – a ‘birth narrative’ of a very different sort. We find neither Mary nor Joseph, …
