When I think of the second Sunday of Advent I tend towards thinking of place.  Whether it is the traveling return to Bethlehem or a John of wilderness, the place of life intrigues.  Place, be it the straw, feed, and animals of a stable or locusts, honey, and the river Jorden, draws us to creational intimacy.  Where better to exist than in the liminal space of intimacy and peace?

The spirituality of the natural Christ is known in place.  All that we are aware of that is ancient and everlasting is the Christ who existed in Bethlehem and the Jordan long before human birth.  The wilderness of John and the landscape of a Bethlehem journey speaks to the unincorporated everydayness of Christ.  Nothing special here, a river, a donkey, a dirt road, a breeze, shrubs, and people—yet it all is singularly exceptional.

To look around our place and see the Christ of grass, the bare tree Christ, the Christ of fallen leaf, the rabbit Christ, the Christ of ridge, the quail Christ,  the Christ of water, the hitchhiker-farmworker-mother-houseless-child Christ is to know we are uniquely and wonderfully of our place.  To learn and then to know our everydayness—our ordinariness—is the beginning of knowing our intimacy with the Christ of creation’s landscape.  And therein lies harmony.