Advent Meditation 2025, Week 1

Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), from his set of four paintings, The Four Freedoms (1934) – Freedom from Want. This set of four paintings was inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address. The President spoke of the freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.¹

Did you notice how, except for those serving the meal, everyone is finding their delight not in looking at the food, but in looking at each other? Even that man, who is peaking out at us from the bottom right-hand corner, is looking at us. Do you see the humor in his eyes?

NOTE: For the best copy of this Meditation, with all formatting in place, click here for the PDF:

Biblical Text

Lamentations 3:21-24 (NJB)


Robert Davidson on Lamentations 3:21-24 - The end of the previous section leaves unanswered the question: If the Lord is responsible for the suffering and the tragedy being experienced, to whom does the poet turn for help? The answer, as in so many of the Psalms, is to no one other than the Lord, the same God who is the source of his trouble. Let us follow this answer through four stages in verses 21–39. (1) The answer begins in verses 21–24 by recalling what alone can be the foundation of hope, the true character of God as Israel had known Him in the past. All the great words of assurance come tumbling out: God’s “steadfast love” (hesed), that constancy which means that he could never walk out on his people (see comments on Jer. 2:2 in vol.1, pp. 24–25); his “mercies”, his warm compassion (raham, a Hebrew word that basically means the womb); and his “faithfulness”, that dependable support which will never let anyone down. The words recall the description of God given, according to Exodus 34:6, to Moses when he received the stone tablets with the commandments: “The Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness…”.³

Some Musical Versions of the Following Text

See: Fernando Ortega, The Shadow of Your Wings: Hymns and Sacred Songs (released 2006); Steven Curtis Chapman, Deeper Roots: Where the Bluegrass Grows (released 2019); Anthem Lights, Hymn-Capella (released 2020); Keith & Kristyn Getty, Getty Kids [four girls!] Hymnal – Hymns from Home (released 2021); Carrie Underwood, My Savior (released 2021).

Text

“Great is They Faithfulness, O God My Father”⁴
By Thomas O. Chisholm (1866-1960)⁵

 1. Great is thy faithfulness, O God, my Father;
There is no shadow of turning with thee.
Thou changest not, thy compassions, they fail not;
As thou hast been, thou forever wilt be.

Refrain:
Great is thy faithfulness,
Great is thy faithfulness,
Morning by morning new mercies I see.
All I have needed thy hand hast provided;
Great is thy faithfulness,
Lord unto me.

2. Summer and winter and springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon, and stars in their courses above
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love. [Refrain]

3. Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth,
Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide;
Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow,
Blessings all mine and ten thousand beside. [Refrain]

A Close Reading of the Text

Great is thy faithfulness, O God, my Father – That this hymn begins with the adjective “great” asks us to consider in what sense it is great. We can dismiss that it means “great physical size” and overlook any chance that it means that God is pregnant, as in “great with child”, though the idea that God is pregnant with faithfulness has poetic power. But we feel ourselves closer to what Chisholm means with “of long duration; lasting, or having lasted, a long time.” Is there not something implied in the very idea of faithfulness that it has gone on for a long time? Thus, we consider ourselves blessed when we have at least a few “old” friends – their enduring, tested presence in our lives.

When he writes “O God, my Father”, we notice how Chisholm is joining two utterly different realities: the created world and God. He articulates that this joining is through a relationship of mutual affection; there is tenderness in it.

One reality is referenced in the exclamation “O God”, which emphasizes God’s supreme otherness (the Hebrew sense of the word “holy”): no one and no thing is remotely equal to God.


This exclamation expresses awe but also the fear (a “holy” fear, not a “servile”⁷ fear) that one feels in the presence of the Holy One.

The other reality is elegantly referenced in “my Father”. In this, we see proven the success of the mission of Jesus Christ, Who has made us able to say, and in truth, that the utterly transcendent God, the Pantókrator⁹, is Someone to whom we have been given access – “my Father” and “our Father / who art in Heaven”. The tradition speaks of how Christ came “to open for us the gates of Heaven”.


Morning by morning new mercies I see / All I have needed thy hand hast provided – We think of the Wilderness years, when God’s chosen people wandered and at considerable risk out in a harsh landscape that none of them knew, and where often they suffered thirst and hunger.

But God, each morning, gave them manna (from the Hebrew meaning, “What’s this?!”), which was not what they wanted but what they needed. (Such an important spiritual understanding of broad application, so important for each of us to grasp.)


Join with all nature in manifold witness / To thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love – We Americans (hardly us alone) are now daily in danger of being whelmed by “the human stain”, by the (human) world that, as William Wordsworth (1770-1815) noted, with grief,


 And which the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ (1884-1889) describes in this way:  


 But what does “whelmed” mean?

What our poet enjoins us to do, writing in a day long before screens and their manifold artificial realities colonized our attention, is to go outside, to stare far less at screens and more at the natural world – to go outside and learn to pay attention to the “timely help” God gives us in Nature - “And for all this, nature is never spent; / There lives a dearest freshness deep down things”!¹⁴ For in Nature we have a “manifold¹⁵ witness” to God’s “great faithfulness, mercy, and love.”
 

Consider what an AI offered me today, when I queried it about how much time each day that we Americans are gaping at screens, at images of images,¹⁶ rather than getting ourselves out among the trees and plants and other wild things of this Earth, learning to pay attention there.

 
An Advent Prayer
 
The opening stanza from the hymn Conditor Alme Siderum (“Gracious Maker of the Stars Above”) found in the Evening Prayer of the Liturgy of Hours, the Breviary, for the Season of Advent, Year A:

¹ See: https://www.mfah.org/blogs/inside-mfah/norman-rockwells-four-freedoms.

² The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), La 3:21–24.

³ Robert Davidson, Jeremiah and Lamentations, vol. 2 of The Daily Study Bible Series (Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 1983), 193.

⁴ Kenneth W. Osbeck, Amazing Grace: 366 Inspiring Hymn Stories for Daily Devotions (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1996), 348. “While many enduring hymns are born out of a particular dramatic experience, this was simply the result of the author’s “morning by morning” realization of God’s personal faithfulness in his daily life. Shortly before his death in 1960, Thomas Chisholm wrote: ‘My income has never been large at any time due to impaired health in the earlier years which has followed me on until now. But I must not fail to record here the unfailing faithfulness of a covenant-keeping God and that He has given me many wonderful displays of His providing care, which have filled me with astonished gratefulness.’”

⁵ From Hymnary.org – “Thomas O. Chisholm was born in Franklin, Kentucky in 1866. His boyhood was spent on a farm and in teaching district schools [beginning at age 16]. He spent five years as editor of the local paper at Franklin. He was converted to Christianity at the age of 26 and soon after was business manager and office editor of the Pentecostal Herald of Louisville, Ky. In 1903 he entered the ministry of the M. E. Church South. His aim in writing was to incorporate as much Scripture as possible and to avoid flippant or sentimental themes.”

The M.E. Church South – “The Methodist Episcopal Church, South (M.E. Church South; pro-slavery) was a Protestant denomination formed in 1845 after a split in the Methodist Episcopal Church over the issue of slavery. It became the dominant Methodist body in the American South until merging into the Methodist Church in 1939.” (Microsoft CoPilot)

⁶ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ho 11:9.

⁷ The Oxford English Dictionary at “servile” – 1.b. - a1425 – Of, belonging to or proper to a slave or slaves; characteristic of or associated with slavery or servitude. Earliest applied (in servile dread; later also servile fear) to fear of or respect for authority (esp. God) which is motivated by knowledge of the possibility of punishment for wrongdoing rather than by love or reverence.

⁸ Mitchell G. Reddish, “Holy One,” in The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992) 258.

⁹ The Oxford English Dictionary at “Pantrokrator” - A ruler of all things; (Christian Church) (a title given to) God or Christ as the Almighty. Hence: an artistic representation of Christ as ruler of the universe, esp. as an image in Byzantine and Orthodox iconography.

¹⁰ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 17:7–9.

¹¹ New American Bible, Revised Edition. (Washington, DC: The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011), Ex 16:15 & 21.

¹² See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45564/the-world-is-too-much-with-us.

¹³ See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur.

¹⁴ From the same poem by Hopkins, SJ.

¹⁵ The Oxford English Dictionary at “manifold” – 1.a. - Old English – Varied or diverse in appearance, form, or character; having various forms, features, component parts, relations, applications, etc.; performing several functions at once.

¹⁶ A reference to that particularly famous “Allegory of the Cave” in Plato’s Republic dialogue, Book VII, 514a to 520a.