December 2025
The New Beginning in Advent
A strange promise, isn’t it? Advent arrives just as November wraps us in weather we didn’t ask for. The bright colors fade, the leaves are crunching under our feet like our dreams, and the early dusk matches our moods. And maybe—just maybe—it’s not only the time change that unsettles us. It’s the heaviness around us. People are worried about having enough food. Some families are keeping children home out of fear. Even if we ourselves have jobs, steady homes, and relative stability, we still breathe in the world’s unease. But why if this is not about us?
Here is where a Russian thinker Vladimir Vernadsky spoke of something he called the noosphere—a sphere of human thought and emotion that circles the earth like the biosphere and atmosphere you and I learned in school. A shared field of our collective fears, hopes, wounds, and dreams.
"Noosphere." — the idea that Earth evolves from a geological sphere (geosphere) to a biological sphere (biosphere), and into a sphere shaped by conscious human thought: the noosphere. A living layer of “collective intelligence”.
The idea of “collective intelligence” rings true for over 150 years. It answers many questions and supports the Great Commandment. We don’t just live next to one another; we live inside one another’s emotional climate.
So, when your neighbor’s anxiety rises, some part of it reaches you. When whole communities suffer hunger, grief, or fear, the air changes for all of us. And when compassion, courage, and faith grow, people choose hope—yes, that moves through the noosphere toward joy.
Advent is our way of remembering that we are not powerless in this shared human field.
Together we can reshape what we breathe. Why? Because a New Beginning is coming. Advent points us back to our first love—the simple, unguarded trust we once had before the world taught us cynicism. It invites us to peel away the layers of suspicion, self-protection, and weariness. Advent is God whispering, Let’s start again.
The miracle at the center of it all still astonishes me. God chooses to come to us fragile and small—wrapped in the same skin and heartbeat that you and I carry. No distance. God breathes our air, shares our fears, enters our noosphere completely—and transforms it from the inside out.
Hope. Peace. Joy. Love. These are not holiday slogans. They are the new atmosphere God creates when Christ is born in us again.
My invitation to you this season is simple:
Remember your first love.
Remember the tenderness that once felt easy.
Let your heart be open again.
And together, let’s alter the noosphere.
With my curious heart,
Pastor Lydia
