Wednesday, Dec. 8 - 11th Day of Advent

Here’s a story my grandpa, a rabbi, used to tell me:

Shlemiel, the town fool, caught sight of something lying on the road. It glinted and twinkled in the light. “Aha!” he chuckled. “What have we here? Someone has lost something precious.”

He picked it up. It was a mirror. When he looked at it and saw his face, he threw it down again. “Yuck!” he exclaimed. “No wonder they threw it away. it’s so ugly!”

When I grew up, I learned to obverse side of the mirror joke.

A young boy, who lived in a poor and remote village of Nazi-occupied Crete, found in the middle of the road the broken pieces of a mirror that had come off a Wehrmacht motorbike.

Having nothing much to play with, the boy tried to put all the pieces together, and when he couldn’t, shaped the biggest of the fragments into a mirror, round and smooth, the size of a watch face. He invested a little game: reflecting the sunlight into the remotest and unlikeliest nooks and crannies he could find. In time, as he grew up, it dawned on him that this game was a metaphor for what he wanted to do with his life - to reflect the light into the furthest reaches of this globe.

Today, Alexander Papaderos’ peace institute is known the world over.

So it could be, I suspect, for each one of us. We have a choice. We can pick up the fragments that make up our lives and, seeing our own faces, our own brokenness, throw down the pieces. Give up on making any sense of them.

Or little by little, we can shape those fragments into something. Something that somehow, somewhere reflects the light. Acknowledging, of course that we are not the light. Still less the source of the light. But willing nevertheless, to reflect it - love, care, understanding, peace into the darkest places of our lives of the world.

The Christmas presence.

But where can the impulse to do this come from?

Closing Prayer

Light of life, teach us to be aware

Help us to see the places where we can be reflecting your light

in the world.

Amen.