Advent is the name the church gives to the four weeks before Christmas. It is a time of preparation and a time of waiting. But do we know how to wait? You bet we do. We do it all the time. But aren’t we rubbish at it. We hate it. In fact, whatever we can do to avoid it – taking a shortcut, driving to work at an unsocial hour, buying online, paying for speedy boarding, whatever it is…we are there and doing it. But Advent is about making a virtue out of the waiting, it is about really really doing it well.

It's about looking for God and hoping for God, and waiting for God, …in a situation where God's presence, his promises, his embrace of our world, is ambiguous, is not yet proven. And that is part of our human life. To live in this intermediate world, neither Heaven nor Hell, neither all good or all bad, with its contradictions, its frustrations, its moments of absolute pain and its moments of absolute glory.

So we wait…because we don’t yet know. We don’t get the big picture. We don’t get God’s vision. We only see a tiny bit. The waiting is where we deal with all the things we don’t know about God - what theologians call the “epistemological distance”, that gap of knowing, between creature and creator, between the object and the subject, between the human and the divine. That part of us that only sees bits, pieces, the mess on the back of the tapestry and not the beautiful picture on the other side.

And it is at Advent that we can cultivate that discipline. A time to put a check on our rush to the happy ending, a time to hear the angel’s message, a time to abide in the fields, a time to follow a star, a time to wait on God. “Now, we see only in part”, wrote St Paul. “We see in a mirror darkly”. And while we do, we bide our time. We wait.

Click 'More Info' below to see a recitation of Rowan Williams 'Advent Calendar'

Every Tuesday morning at 10am

Simply tune in on Zoom and enjoy a few moments of quiet, prayerful reflection as the week unfolds. It will last no longer than 10 minutes.

Meeting ID: 892 2955 4820 Passcode: 836488

A time to pause, pray, reflect and reconnect.

No preparation needed.

Time for conversation for those who can stay.

“….Waiting on God, learning to be passive in a way creative for your inner life, is not a question of thinking about God, but of growing in stillness. It has to do with prayer, and with music or from the simple contemplation of the world about you.” (Michael Mayne, ‘A Year Lost and Found’)

Not many days now to our ever popular Festival of Carols, with the choral ensemble, La Vid y La Vida. Friday 19th December at 3.00 pm in Salinas Church.

The Carol Festival will consist of traditional & modern readings, choir pieces and carols for everyone to sing. It is our biggest event of the year and we recommend you arrive early to get a seat.

Afterwards we will serve mince pies and wine.

This year´s Festival is in aid of Asociación Girasol which gives free and loving end-of-life care to people with advanced, incurable diseases.

Do come and join us in celebrating this festive seeason!

At Christmas time we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ in a stable in Bethlehem. We are all familiar with the story - the little town of Bethlehem, the shepherds watching their flocks, the herald angels singing, the 3 Kings from Persian lands afar, and the birth of a small baby to young & humble, yet delighted, parents.

But, of course, this story is purely the outer wrapping of a deeper theological truth, which we celebrate at Christmastide - the fact that God entered his creation, not as some big “I am” kind of God, all glory and hallelujah, but in humility, and ordinariness, …in the person of a small child, just like one of us. In that little baby, in that manger, was our God, an imminent God, a present God, a God who was to experience human life.

Our God got out of his heaven and got involved with the things of every day. He knew what it was like to be small and vulnerable; he knew what it was like to be in a family; he knew what it was like to be misunderstood, to be rejected by others; he knew what it was like to have fun with his friends; he knew what it was like to lose loved ones, to be tortured and abused; he knew what it was like to have his life taken from him in pain and anguish.

The big danger at Christmas is sentimentality. Somewhere in the middle of the Christmas hype, the “much mistle-toeing” and “kids jingle-belling”, we need to find the baby Jesus where he is today.

Oscar Romero, head of the Roman Catholic Church in El Salvador, who was assassinated in 1980 for his opposition to the military government, wrote this: 'We must not seek the child Jesus in the pretty figures of our Christmas cribs. We must seek him among the undernourished children who have gone to bed at night with nothing to eat, among the poor newsboys who will sleep covered with newspapers in doorways'.

PIcture above: Belen in Iznajar