I keep track of the Christmas gifts I need to buy and the cards I need to send in a bullet journal, where I also track the work I need to get done this day, this week, this month, this year. My digital calendar is full of meetings and travel dates, but my mornings are blocked out for prayer, meditation and writing time. Each Friday, I make a plan for the next week, including the weekend. Having a plan, even if it gets disrupted, helps me relax. That’s how God designed me.
This Advent, I’ve been considering patterns of life and designs of God through a devotional I wrote for the Outlook: “Patterns of Divine Possibility.” The idea for the devotional came as I read Abraham Verghese’s novel The Covenant of Water. As Verghese’s main character, 12-year-old Mariamma, prepares to leave her childhood home in India to meet her husband by arranged marriage, she recalls the words of her deceased father: “Faith is to know the pattern is there, even when none is visible.”
Faith is to trust a pattern exists, to search for God’s handiwork in the myriad designs of life. But too often we limit God’s range, boxing our Creator into designs of our own making, denying the more of divinity. If we pause to consider how God has organized our world, what would we learn?
Consider nature’s fractals, for example. If we examine the head of a cauliflower, the leaves of a fern, the community within the fluff of a dandelion, or the design of a single snowflake, we will discover fractals: patterns that repeat, over and over, each small section reflecting the pattern of the whole.
In her 2017 book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, adrienne maree brown writes about how fractals ground her work as an activist and community organizer. She’s learned that justice movements need small local successes before they can grow regionally, nationally or globally. “The patterns of the universe repeat at scale,” brown writes. “There is a structural echo that suggests two things: one, that there are shapes and patterns fundamental to our universe, and two, that what we practice at a small scale can reverberate to the largest scale.”
Destructive patterns also start small and then reverberate with large consequences: our patterns of plenty lead to overconsumption and abuse of natural resources, our patterns of productivity bring overwork and burnout, our patterns of self-protection devalue the path of nonviolence and overvalue investment in weapons and warfare.
But small patterns can initiate large, positive fractal change. This Christmas we celebrate the birth of a baby — one tiny, fragile soul born into a world large with oppression, violence and injustice. Jesus was a singular individual who lived a short life. But he patterned his life on love, compassion and justice. He countered cultural practices and patterns by spending time with tax collectors, foreigners, lepers, women and children. He resisted violence with nonviolence. He modeled an alternative pattern of living, to great impact.
Every Christmas Eve, at the end of the candlelight service, I find myself choking up with emotion, unable to sing the final notes of “Silent Night.” The light – spreading so easily, growing and expanding – fills me with hope … for me … for us … for our world. The pattern of light we witness on Christmas Eve, where each single candle joins a roomful of candles to illuminate a large sanctuary, is a powerful testament to the ways in which Christ is present and at work among us. Christ not only illuminates our common bonds as humans but shows what we can accomplish when we work together toward the good. We can powerfully share and spread the good news of God’s great love; we can practice Christ’s patterns to great impact.
