This 16-minute guided meditation invites you to review your Advent meditations, to hold silence on the threshold between Advent and Christmas, and to imagine God's new life being born again within you.

Dear Ones---

This guided meditation is for anyone who has been praying throughout Advent and would like to hold a moment of stillness between the longing and hope of Advent, and the celebratory feast of Christmas.

You are invited to be still, to wait, to remember, to imagine.

We are held in the paradox between what is and what is to come, the paradox between our poverty, our dependence, our frailty and the fullness of life that is poured out to us each and every day.

We pause here to acknowledge that tension, to attend to the Holy One who comes anew in us.

References in the meditation:

Lamentations 3:22-23

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning.

Isaiah 43:19

See I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?

Prayer of Teilhard de Chardin (excerpted from Hearts on Fire, Praying with the Jesuits)

Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don't try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

Blessings, Dear One....

Contemplative at Home offers guided meditative prayer – space to slow down and listen to the truth that is being born out of God's love for you today – drawing on Ignatian spirituality and at times, Lectio Divina.

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All music by Pete Hatch.

Pause for Christmas Eve - A Guided Meditation