Advent Four

All through this last Sunday of Advent, CBC Radio has been filling my home with music. The music has come live from Oslo, Prague, London, Helsinki, Austria and Germany. Though Peter Tagny has been there all day offering translation of the commentary, much of the music has been sung in languages I cannot understand. Yet the emotion and something deeper, more primal, is as clear as winter air. The music expresses the longing of our human hearts for hope in this time of darkness, for love, for assurance that life holds beauty and grace. As I listened, I thought of Iceland, bankrupt. London, freezing. Yet the music continues. Yesterday, I heard John Komura Parker speak of playing  Beethoven's "Emperor" in Sarajevo, in the 1990's. An old woman approached him afterwards to say,  "While I listened,  I forgot about the war. "

Advent prepares us for Christmas by helping us to remember. The longings of our heart are not in vain. There is love, and reason to hope. As Yvone Gebara has written: Jesus comes from here: from this earth, this body, this flesh, from the evolutionary process that is present both yesterday and today in the Sacred Body within which love resides. It continues in him beyond that, and is turned into passion for life, into mercy and justice. 

May your Christmas be joyful and may your hopes be great. May you embody in your life the love we long for, and know yourself to be held in a love deeper than even music can express. 

Rose in Advent

This third Sunday of Advent is the day when the rose candle is lighted in the former penitential purple colour scheme. Rose suits this third week as Christmas comes near enough to touch. Already we have had gatherings of friends, been serenaded with the music of Christmas, even amazingly in a crowded mall in Welland when a seemingly spontaneous chorus of Handel's Messiah rose to astonish and delight unsuspecting shoppers.

By Rose Sunday, each year, my inner Scrooge collapses. The part of me that says humbug when the first Christmas decorations appear before Halloween, has again given into the delights of beauty and celebration, the anticipation that the depth of winter darkness is about to be overturned with the Solstice dawn.

Yesterday, I gathered with a group of women for a day of Retreat. We spoke about the way that darkness each year calls us into quiet, into waiting, into deepening of the yearning for new life, in our hearts, our circle of family and friends, our planet. We reflected on the truth that we are called as co-creators of this newness, as surely as Mary was called to birth the Child of Light and Hope.

Christmas is far more than a memory of a story of long ago. It is a patterning for our lives, for our work of birthing newness in the way that is unique to each of us. Far from saying humbug to our childhood yearnings for Christmas, we are to ask for more, much more:
 for fulness of life for ourselves, for those we love, for the earth and all that lives upon her.
Let the longing begin on this Rose Sunday. Let it be strong enough, deep enough, bold enough that together we may give birth to the new life that is the heart of Christmas.

The Darkening of Advent

On Advent's first Sunday, the earth was still green with memories of summer, the green pines I brought indoors for the Advent wreath held hope, the fragrance of promise. Soon after I wrote my first Advent blog, green descended to grey, then into black with each earlier night. Advent Darkness rose up from the depths, engulfed me. Transition. The early Celts understood this so well, this dark time which they called the feminine time, when contemplation, stillness, waiting overtake the bright sun's call to activity. One evening  I read some words of Rilke: All creation holds its breath listening within me, because to hear you, I keep silent. I made the crossing over, fell in love again with the darkness that yearly draws us into  the womb where new life is being woven. Again Rilke: Let this darkness be the bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. The Celtic Christians awaited the new birth of the sun at Solstice as they awaited the Christmas celebration of the dawn of light and love among us. And we know what they could only intuit: the universe was  birthed out of  darkness, and to this day remains 96% in a darkness that holds all in place. We are most deeply at home in darkness, held, and created anew by the love that moves the sun and all the stars.   Sink into this welcoming dark, and light the second Advent candle.

The Greening of Advent

On this first Sunday of Advent I put on layers of warm clothing and set out for my annual harvesting of green boughs from the generous pine trees who share my homespace. One large bough of red pine leans precariously over the river, offering easy access to its lower branches. I choose four branches of abundant pliant pine, asking the tree's permission. Indoors, I arrange the boughs around the metal advent circle, place four tall green candles in the holders, and feel the first breath of Christmas Spirit. Why green? Well, first because they're the only new candles I have! But on another level, they are the best colour for a  season so full of hope. Advent awakens each year fresh longing in our lives for love and gladness. As Jean Houston teaches: Christmas is about yearning for something to come into the world. It's the story of the birth of love, of hope, of a Holy Child in huge danger of being destroyed, bringing a new order of possibility into the world, needing to be protected and nurtured so it may grow into a free and luminous, numinous being.  
Let the longing begin!

Rupert Brooke and Mysticism

If  I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by her rivers, blest by suns of home.

Ebullient, loved, the poet Rupert Brooke was twenty-eight when he died in 1915 in the Aegean. His poetry, which I've been reading from an ancient volume found in Otawa's main library, is a celebration of life which he already felt slipping from his grasp. ( He refers to himself in a letter to a friend as "middle-aged".) For Rupert, life was awash in beauty, and his mysticism which he said had nothing to do with religion, was his secret defense against despair. He wrote to a friend:

"(Mysticism) is just looking at people and things as themselves -- neither useful nor moral nor ugly nor anything else; but just as being....What happens is that I suddenly feel the extraordinary value and importance of everybody I meet, and almost everything I see....
when the mood is on me, I roam about places ...and sit in trains and see the essential glory and beauty of all the people I meet.... I tell you that a Birmingham gouty Tariff Reform fifth-rate business man is splendid and immortal....
"It's the same about things of ordinary life. Half an hour's roaming about a street or village or railway station shows so much beauty that it's impossible to be anything but wild with suppressed exhilaration. And it's not only beauty and beautiful things. In a flicker of sunlight on a blank wall, or a reach of muddy pavement or smoke from an engine at night, there's a sudden significance and importance and inspiration that makes the breath stop with a gulp of certainty and happiness."

This man whom I did not know, who died before even my mother was born, has touched my life. When I regret the passing of time, I think of his short life, which he lived to the hilt, and know that we have both been offered the same gift: this now, these eyes, this openness to see the beauty and wonder all around us. We have no more than this. But we need no more than this sacred moment. 

Earth Now and Evensong

Today the poet Rilke has the words I seek. A feather pillow of snow has shaken itself over the summer picnic table, the brown leafstrewn earth. The lawn chair where I used to sit for morning coffee has been commandeered by a red squirrel. Too cold now to be outdoors, the autumn shift from riverside to fireside is already complete. Yet I feel happiness surging up from within me. Rilke understands: "Summer was like your house: you know where each thing stood. Now you must go out into your heart as onto  a vast plain. Now the immense loneliness begins. The days go numb, the wind sucks the world from your senses  like withered leaves. Through the empty branches the sky remains. It is what you have. Be earth now and evensong. Be the ground lying under that sky. Be modest now, like a  thing ripened until it is real, so that he who began it all can feel you when he reaches for you."

Deepening Spirit

Energies of love and compassion, wisdom and intelligence are available to us, are seeking us to embody them for the needs of our time. If we open ourseleves in trust with  a willingness to create a grwoign space in our lives for these gifts, their presence in us will expand and touch those around us. We are called to grow what is needed spiritually for our time as our ancestors were called to grow wheat in theirs. We are called to set out to travel into new oceans of  the spirit even as our ancestors set out to cross oceans in ships. The journey is difficult and dangerous, but the  alternative is a life of utter  emptiness.