Advent:ures

Some poetic fragments and a song from a season of waiting in the dark

I’ve never managed to maintain an advent practice. I’ve known in theory it’s supposed to be a sombre, reflective time in the church calendar before the bright burst of feasting, but in secular time the feasting (and the tinny music and electric lights) all bleed backwards. There is, it seems, no time to wait in the dark. It’s easy to get to Christmas Day itself celebrated out, already hungry for the fast after the feast, the quiet frugality of January.

This year, I really needed advent. The Holy Land which the stories of my tradition centre at this time of year is riven, not with angels singing, but with horrors. That patch of earth is soaked with blood, under the shadow of death, waiting in darkness. Rushing ahead to the light felt like fracturing time.

I should have known it was poetry I needed to help me really be in this season, not the coming one. It’s voice cries in the wilderness saying: attend.

A dear friend got me a book: Frequencies of God: Walking through Advent with R.S.Thomas. It offers up a daily poem by the Welsh poet-priest, and I have not yet had a day when this voice has not arrested me. Strange and at times spikey, Thomas, (and Carys Walsh the editor) stay in the edge places. Neither of them attempts to tidy up the un-tinselly mood of the season or the gospel tales it draws on. This for example:

I have this that I must do

One day: overdraw on my balance

Of air, and breaking the surface

Of water go down into the green

Darkness to search for the door

To myself in dumbness and blindness

And uproar of scared blood

At the eardrums. There are no signposts

There but bones of the dead

Conger, no light but the pale

Phosphorus, where the slow corpses

Swag. I must go down with the poor

Purse of my body and buy courage,

Paying for it with the coins of my breath.

Walsh says “with its watery imagery, it’s loss of control, it’s willing surrender of the self [this] is a poem of baptism at its most risky, with all the potential for drowning and being overwhelmed. It is a poem of being called into a new depth of identity that requires searing honesty, courage, risk and hope….This is an advent acceptance of ourselves. It is an acceptance that our life, for all our careful planning and shaping” is not our own. That finding our life might mean losing it.

I’ve also been rereading Every Riven Thing by Christian Wiman, perhaps my favourite collection of poetry. Wiman has come to wider notice recently because of this piece in The New Yorker. I have long loved his writing because it wrestles with metaphysical longings with unflinching honesty and electric language. These verses, from Gone for the Day, She is the Day, for example, feel fitting for an advent season of waiting in the dark when you don’t know the ending:

Sometimes one has a sense

that to say the name of God is a great betrayal,

but whether one is betraying

God, language or one’s self

Is harder to say…..

To love is to feel your death

Given to you like a sentence

To meet the judge’s eyes

As if there were a judge,

As if he had eyes,

And love

I have felt this. How to say The Name in this season, in this geopolitical moment, to know what on earth I mean by it. It can sit like a stone on my tongue, threatening to go down the wrong way. Poetry is helping me taste it.

Finally, Advent Calendar from Rowan Williams, read every year and previously the only real advent practice I had:

He will come like last leaf’s fall.

One night when the November wind

has flayed the trees to the bone, and earth

wakes choking on the mould,

the soft shroud’s folding.

He will come like frost.

One morning when the shrinking earth

opens on mist, to find itself

arrested in the net

of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.

One evening when the bursting red

December sun draws up the sheet

and penny-masks its eye to yield

the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,

will come like crying in the night,

like blood, like breaking,

as the earth writhes to toss him free.

He will come like child.

Like blood, like breaking. A later-murdered child. This is an advent hymn I can work with, this year.

I am so grateful to have readers who will be celebrating all kinds of festivals at this time, and none, who tolerate my attempts to talk of the stone on my tongue with such grace. Some of you are animists and atheists and Taoists and Jewish and astrologically inclined, and I would love to hear about your rituals and practices in the comments, wherever you are coming from. What is helping you live in step with time and mourn what needs mourning, so maybe, just maybe, we can also rejoice over what deserves it?

As many of us go into at least a measure of withdrawal and rest, I am holding you in my heart today and praying a blessing - that you may not be afraid of waiting in the dark, and that you would know that light is coming.

You may have noticed this post is a week early. I’ve switched up the pacing so I can take some time off over Christmas and New Year. This means my next newsletter will be in early January. Until then, I’m listening to this.