Advent 1 – Waiting in Ignorance (based on a sermon given at St. Thomas, Weston)
In My Beginning is My End The famous poem, “East Coker” written in the early years of the Second World War by the great poet laureate, TS Eliot, contains a stanza most fitting for our service today: Do not let me hear Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly, Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession, Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God. The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless. We enter the season of Advent, the beginning of the Christian Calendar, in the midst of a pandemic that is raging out of control. Over 1.4 million people have died already of this disease, 12 thousand of those deaths have been Canadians and over 250 of those are here in Manitoba. Large numbers of deaths are hard to comprehend, rather than tragedies we experience them as statistics. But 250 dead Manitobans is as if my entire hometown had been wiped off the map this year. That is a lot of pain, a lot of grief, an