Celtic advent runs from Nov 15th to give 40 days until Christmas. It is a dark season, as the nights draw in. A time for waiting, hope, sitting with the unknown and fasting from those things which distract and cushion us from the pain of the world. It is a reflection of the 40 days in the desert and a winter complement to Lent. Advent is, like Lent, a time for repentance but we look forward to the strange and unexpected joy of the incarnation, through the low entrance to the stable, which in all likelihood was a cave, not even a building. A time for setting our hearts in the right direction. What will we fast from?
May it also be a time to plot revolution against the unjust structures of the world and our own unreal edifices? A revolution of love, of turning to really follow Christ into the path of loving non-violence and relinquishing of our egos?
Advent can be a time for reconnecting with the earth and our inner knowledge that everything is sacred. The stillness and waiting of advent help us to understand time depth and use our spiritual imaginations to embrace the breadth of the earth, everything and everyone in it and truly find our place here. To carry the light of God in the period of steadily increasing night and to sit with the dark days and evenings.
John Donne's deeply moving poem “A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy's Day” on the death of his wife, uses the metaphor of the winter solstice, 21st December, which falls within the time of advent. It expresses the utter bleakness of complete grief and hopelessness. A short excerpt here but I thoroughly recommend you find the complete poem and read it. I have found it consoling in the time of my deepest grief and ever since. Sometimes we cannot comfort with words but rather echo another’s grief, so know they are heard:
"For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not."
As most of us know through bitter experience, this is part of life, we all come to this on a personal level and at the moment the state of the world can overwhelm us with hopelessness. The period before Jesus' birth was as hopeless and terrifying as the world is now. His mother Mary had no choice but to wait but chose to wait with expectation, rather than dread.
As part of thinking about my own life and work, I come to my art and working out how I can express God through this. A painting or any other creative act, is brought forth as a birth of sorts, often with a very protracted labour and for a lot of us, with no idea at the beginning of when or how there will be an end, let alone one which brings satisfaction or joy. Yet still we are compelled to start and labour and wait.
In our waiting and our privileged time for creation we can spare time to wait in the dark for and with those who have no hope nor hope of any future.
Beautiful. All of it. Thank you💗
Beautiful writing & artwork. I worship in the RC tradition, but I think we lost something when our Advent period was shortened from the 40 days that you still honor, and the fasting essentially swept away. I had never read that John Donne poem-- off now to locate it in its entirety, so thank you.