21st December, 2024
Maria Harris, Proclaim Jubilee!: A Spirituality for the Twenty-First Century (Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 106.
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'Jubilee is a great and majestic ritual … Like Sabbath, its proclamation is toward ceasing ordinary labor. ... The [Jubilee] tradition of waiting upon the Holy by pausing to let the land lie fallow is never far from the jubilarian imagination. As part of a jubilee liturgy, and placed at its centre, the particular power of this step lies in its fostering the conditions for necessary listening—the “centering down” that Quakers speak of—in order to wait upon that One variously invoked as the Holy, the Mystery at the core of the universe, Jehovah, or the Creator Spirit—the One some of us call God or the Great Mother and others refer to as “beyond all names”—so that we might hear what the Holy requires of us as persons and as communities. We listen so that we might find ways to proclaim liberty throughout the land and so to search out what belongs to whom, in order to give it back.
As this century ends and another begins, people of many religious paths—even of none—have begun to observe regular periods of such stillness as part of their personal spirituality, pausing daily for twenty- or thirty-minute periods not to address but to be addressed by and to listen to the Holy. Through such practices, they have become attuned to hearing the Holy not only in human voices but in the cries of the earth and the headlines of the newspaper. They have also become attuned to hearing the Holy in the silence.
Jubilation, however, is a communal tradition; therefore, at this point in the Jubilee liturgy, persons bring the power such practice develops in their private lives to listening together in community, as a corporate task where one another’s presence is a source of strength. They wait. They cultivate stillness. … Always they make this step central, neither rushing it nor forgetting it. Sabbath candles lighted, they refuse to be anxious. Instead, they engage in emptying their minds and hearts of busyness.'
Pages 102, 103 & 106.