Blessedly bleak midwinter

On feeling twitchy around nuns and going goth for advent.

Image by Eyayu Estub on unsplash

I am sitting in an Abbey, fidgeting. It’s a minimalist 1960s building, starkly beautiful even for someone who much prefers her sacred spaces old old. In the centre of the cavernous nave eight nuns are singing in their high, thin voices. It’s more mournful chanting than lilting melody. Their traditional black and white habits suit the stripped-back surroundings, at home with the copper candle sticks and plain concrete altar. This is an enclosed order, so I’m off to one side in a guest chapel, in sight and sound of the sisters, but not really part of things. We guests can read along in silence but attempts to join in are specifically discouraged, making us more observers than participants.

I’ve already given up trying to find my place in the labyrinthine service book, filled with Latin words I don’t know (week one festal antiphon, page 45; on Sundays substitute anemnesis for final doxology)¹. Everyone else in the guest chapel seems to know exactly what page we’re on, when to stand, when to sit or kneel, when to bow with an impressive midbody hinge for a seemingly preordained length of time. It had felt important to find the right page as an anchor for my mind, a grappling hook thrown onto the moving train of the service, but I can’t get purchase. The mysterious book sits beside me on the pew now. I recognise snatches of psalms, but I can’t really tell what they are singing. Am I just supposed to…sit here?

I’ve arrived for a retreat at an Anglican Benedictine Abbey, the focus of which is the eight mini-services which make up the “Daily Office”. The names of these carry a breath of medieval air: Lauds, Eucharist, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, Compline. The traditional matins, said at 3 or 4 am, is thankfully omitted.

I’ve been here before, but not for a long time, and I’d forgotten how strange it is. Also, how slow. One of the sisters walks to the lectern to do a reading as if savouring every step. Once it’s finished, she stands there, looking down at the page, and I assume something else is coming. My mind is ahead of her, poised for the next bit, listening attentively like the teenage swot I still am, but nothing happens. She is just letting the words settle like the dust motes swirling in sideways slices of winter sunlight. Then she moves a big red ribbon, leisurely, to the next reading, and wanders back to her place. She has sat down for a full ten seconds before the psalm singing starts up again. They could really make this more efficient, I think.

This is why I needed to come.

I try and go on retreat every advent. I started doing it when I realised Christmas had almost no spiritual meaning for me. I loved it - who doesn’t love mince pies, copious hot spiced booze, excuses for cosiness? Not the mass overconsumption, so much, but the general vibes suit me down to the ground. I’m an extravert lover of winter and greenery whose spiritual gift is feasting. However, the bit that was supposed to be deeply significant in my tradition just passed me by. We didn’t really do advent, in the churches I spent most time in, kicking off the celebrations on December 1st (or earlier) like everyone else. I’d arrive at December 25th knackered and queasy, already craving raw vegetables and quiet.

Several years ago I gave this talk about how discombobulating I find Christmas, how it seems at least three festivals at once:

1) The festival of domesticity and indulgence, set in motion by the Victorians and super-charged by advertising.

2) The ancient seasonal acknowledgement of the turning of the year, the cold and darkness set ablaze with candles and evergreens and songs in the night

3) The marking of a baby born in poverty in the Middle East, maybe in high summer, whose childhood would be fraught with danger and violence, and whose mother sang in response to her pregnancy :

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,

and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things,

and the rich he has sent away empty.

You might be able to spot more. All these sedimentary layers of meaning and ritual are mixed up now into an unpalatable sweet-savoury trifle. Trying to celebrate them together was doing my head in. It has too often left me defaulting to the first. This is where all the cultural energy takes us if we let it. I never intended to bow down before the icon of a man in a red suit. Especially not one designed by a multi-national soda corporation, and I bet you didn’t either, but somehow, every year, millions of us do. The fact that this figure is residually linked to a saint who gave all he owned to the poor and rescued young women and children from slavery somehow gets lost.

Properly practicing advent has been part of my attempt to inject some sanity into December. When I say properly, I am still going to parties and drinking hot spiced booze. Actual fasting is not really my thing (yet?). In between the parties though, I read this lovely book by Carys Thomas which offers an R.S.Thomas poem for every day of the season. Take this: