All Creation Waits — Gift Edition: The Advent Mystery of New Beginnings (An illustrated Advent devotional with 25 woodcut animal portraits)

By Gayle Boss and David G. Klein

A special gift edition of the bestselling book for Advent that reveals the wisdom and wonder of animals in the natural world

In twenty-five portraits depicting how wild animals of the northern hemisphere ingeniously adapt when darkness and cold descend, we see and hear as if for the first time the ancient wisdom of Advent: The dark is not an end but the way a new beginning comes.

Short, daily reflections capture in vivid detail the intricate and astonishing ways that familiar animals, from the honeybee to the porcupine, prepare for winter. Each day's reading is paired with a charming original woodcut illustration. Anyone who feels tired of the consumer hype of "the holiday season" will be refreshed and awakened to the eternal truth the natural world reveals.

This special gift edition:

• Includes a new introduction, with suggestions for how the book can be used during Advent

• Features inspirational thoughts from men and women through the ages – scientists, poets, and philosophers – who have found God through the beauty of creation

• Includes an Afterword, bringing readers up to date on what has happened since All Creation Waits was first published

• Invites quiet reflection during an often-chaotic holiday season

• Prompts meaningful conversations between children and adults, church groups, book clubs, creation care classes, and much more
• Is an ECPA 2023 Christmas Bestseller

Written with quiet passion and backed by extensive research, All Creation Waits has captured the minds and hearts of thousands of readers of all ages, from children to adults. Gayle Boss invites us to realize that God can be known in all creatures, and that paying attention to these creatures makes us more fully human, more fully ourselves.

"The practice of Advent has always been about helping us to grasp the mystery of a new beginning out of what looks like death. Other-than-human creatures—sprung, like us, from the Source of Life—manifest this mystery without question or doubt. The more I'm with animals and the more I learn about them, the more I know they can be more than our companions on this planet. They can be our guides. They can be to us 'a book about God...a word of God,' the God who comes, even in the darkest season, to bring us a new beginning." —from All Creation Waits

Learn more about All Creation Waits and find free resources at AllCreationWaits.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paraclete Press
• Release date: Sep 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781640608313

Gayle Boss

Gayle Boss writes from West Michigan, where she was born and raised. Her lifelong love of animals and her immersion in spiritual texts and practices have melded in poems and essays that explore how relationships with animals specifically, and an attentive presence in the natural world generally, restore us to our deepest selves. Also the author of Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing, Gayle lives with her husband and Welsh corgi rescue.

Book preview

ALL CREATION WAITS

2022 First Printing This Edition

2020 Fifth and Sixth Printing

2019 Fourth Printing

2018 Third Printing

2017 Second Printing

2016 First Printing

All Creation Waits: The Advent Mystery of New Beginnings

Text copyright © 2016 by Gayle Lynn Boss

Illustrations copyright © 2016 by David G. Klein

ISBN 978-1-64060-804-7

The Paraclete Press name and logo (dove on cross) are trademarks of Paraclete Press, Inc.

The Library of Congress has catalogued the tradepaper edition as follows:

Names: Boss, Gayle, author.

Title: All creation waits : the Advent mystery of new beginnings /

Gayle Boss ; illustrated by David G. Klein.

Description: Brewster MA : Paraclete Press Inc., 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016026453 | ISBN 9781612617855 (trade paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Advent--Meditations. | Creation--Meditations.

Classification: LCC BV40 .B675 2016 | DDC 242/.33--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026453

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cover design by Paraclete Multimedia, Cover illustrations by David G. Klein

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in an electronic retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Paraclete Press

Brewster, Massachusetts

www.paracletepress.com

Printed in India

For Doug, and Kai and Cotter my grace heaped upon grace

and for Cheryl godmother and soul friend

CONTENTS

Introduction

Note to the Reader

ADVENT 1Painted Turtle

ADVENT 2Muskrat

ADVENT 3Black Bear

ADVENT 4Chickadee

ADVENT 5Whitetail Deer

ADVENT 6Honey Bee

ADVENT 7Chipmunk

ADVENT 8Cottontail

ADVENT 9Common Loon

ADVENT 10Wood Frog

ADVENT 11Raccoon

ADVENT 12Little Brown Bat

ADVENT 13Opossum

ADVENT 14Wild Turkey

ADVENT 15Common Garter Snake

ADVENT 16Woodchuck

ADVENT 17Striped Skunk

ADVENT 18Porcupine

ADVENT 19Common Eastern Firefly

ADVENT 20Meadow Vole

ADVENT 21Fastern fox squirrel

ADVENT 22Red Fox

ADVENT 23Northern Cardinal

ADVENT 24Lake Trout

CHRISTMAS DAY Jesus, the christ

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Quotation Sources

INTRODUCTION

Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God.

Every creature is a word of God.

If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature – even a caterpillar—

I would never have to prepare a sermon. So full of God is every creature.

— Meister Eckhart

When our first son was a toddler I wanted to add an Advent calendar to our family’s Advent practices. Before his birth we had already begun to take back late November and December from the holiday season, doing a few things that, though very simple, startled family and friends. We’d given up colored lights and Christmas decorations for four candles on an Advent wreath, only putting the decorations up, with the tree, on Christmas Eve. We waited until then, too, to sing or play or listen to Christmas carols, keeping quiet except to sing O Come, O Come, Emmanueleach evening around the lit wreath. Now and then someone dared to ask us why our home was so un-Christmasy. More people asked more pointedly after our son was born—as if we were denying him some essential of childhood.

We decided to strip down and step back after I read a few paragraphs in a rather dry tome on the history of Christian liturgy. Those paragraphs worked in me like fingers lining up the cylinders of a lock. I still remember the click when that internal lock popped open.

I learned that the roots of Advent run deep beneath the Christian church—in the earth and its seasons. Late autumn, in the northern hemisphere, brings the end of the growing season. When early agricultural peoples had harvested their crops and stacked food in their larders, they gave a collective sigh of relief. Their long days in the fields were over. For their labor they had heaps of fruits, vegetables, grains, and meat. The group body called out, Feast!

At the same time, no matter how glad the party, they couldn’t keep from glancing at the sky. Their growing season was over because the sun had retreated too far south to keep the crops alive. Each day of the fall they watched the light dwindle, felt the warmth weaken. It made them anxious, edgy. Throughout December, as the sun sank and sank to its lowest point on their horizon, they felt the shadow of primal fear—fear for survival—crouching over them. They were feasting, and they were fearful, both. When they had eaten up the crop they were feasting on, how would another crop grow? Yes, last year the sun had returned to their sky. But what if, this year, it didn’t? Despite their collective memory, people wedded, bodily, to the earth couldn’t help but ask the question. Their bodies, in the present tense, asked the question.

Our bodies still ask that question. In December the dark and cold deepen, and our rational minds dismiss it as nothing. We know that on December 21, the winter solstice, the sun will begin its return to our sky. But our animal bodies react with dis-ease. The light—life—is going. Some of us sink into a seasonal depression. Some of us cope by seizing distractions the marketplace gleefully offers: shopping, parties, more shopping.

To be sure, some part of the holiday season is celebration of the harvest, for us, as it was for our ancestors, even if we don’t personally harvest crops. We throw a party to mark the end