Daily Reflection
December 7, 2025

The prophet Isaiah and the Desert Preacher, John, lived within the Advent Spirit most of their lives. We do as well, and not knowing exactly for what or for whom we are hoping, longing, expecting. We have these days of opportunity to check around, or more exactly, into our own spirit of personal adventure.

Isaiah is prophesying of a new birth, a flowering up from the earth into new life. This flower-person will rearrange the forest and farm animals into new personal companions. All the estranged, the nations and gentiles shall seek the glorious dwelling this Flower, this “shoot” will take up on this earth, among us humans. These humans will long for and seek the fragrance of this awaited-for Flower

In today’s Gospel, there is this character, John, who lives in a strict section of Judaism away from Jerusalem. His pouring of water upon people of the Jewish tradition is meant to clean their spirits from the violations of the sacred Law and especially their having had any contact with gentile peoples or their ways. The baptism of John and for the Jewish people was a celebrational reminder of who they were since their being freed from their being slave-stuff into their being God’s Sacred People through the Red Sea and the Exodus.

John has especially strong words for the Scribes and Pharisees coming out to take their turns. They live lives of the external-observances. They also spend their days observing the conduct of their Jewish tribes strictly. They are not rotten to the heart, but they have no interior from which “good fruit” will grow. Externalism is a fake religion within which observing is a spectator sport; it is meant to be seen and admired. John announces that he is laying the ax at the roots of such pretensions. They can relate and quote all their good deeds, and that is prayerful observing.

There is One Who is coming to consecrate with both water and a Spirit who will create a fire for the “within” so that His Spirit will flower to the “with-out”. The harshness of the Law is to be replaced with the gentleness of the interior “fire”.

Now, get set! Prepare the way for today’s Reflector’s ponderings, a Meditation on, of all things, the Belly Button! We all have one at last count.

The Umbilical Cord sent life’s nourishment from somewhere into someone’s somewhere. At our births, it was cut and discarded, but the little reminder was sewn up as a religious sacrament! Of What! you might pray. I smile at the answer. For a number of months, our interiors were being nourished so our exteriors would be seen and heard as alive, sacred, and getting ready for the existence flowing from inside to out!

The Pharisees forgot to meditate on their little buttons. Their exterior actions and those of their fellow Jews were outward manifestations of these, which were the only important reality. self-satisfying and self-ratifying justifications were to be observed by others of course. The tree is not good, because it bears fruit. It produces fruit because of the goodness within. A tree’s belly buttons are its roots and fiber systems, without which it would not be a tree. Without our buttons, there would be no interior, no me.

Advent is an interior joyful time to “take-in” prayerfully, interiorly, the “fire” the, “Spirit” of life symbolized by those little tummy-tucks through which life flowed so that there would be the exterior.

Christmas is a comin and gifts are being prepared, good!!! We are definitely inside-out humans. From our guts and hearts we prepare to give and be gifts of the Life that never stops giving, livingly. “Belly up, mates!”