Another repost because I have found it helpful to take a look at previous advent journeys. This one was from last year, and uses a poem that I am still chewing on- it comes to me regularly as I walk the hills… the sense of being ‘not alone’. I hope it resonates.

It goes without saying that here in the northern hemisphere, the advent season is inseperable from the deepening of winter, the shortening of days towards icy darkness. The longing for light. It is this juxtaposition that adds immersurably to the poigniancy of how we approach it, so much so that I find it difficult to imagine what a southern hemisphere advent, with just the opposite trajectory, might look and feel like.

Here there is also a feeling that we are treading pre-Christian paths too, in that the traditions that come to us only in fragments suggest that our ancestors also felt the spiritual significance of this season, so much so that they celebrated their own rebirth in the great festival of Yule, the winter solstace. Of course, many of these fragments live on in our Christmas traditions – the date itself, the mistletoe, the father christmas, the tree, the candlelight…

Rather than disturbing our Christian world view, I think it is more helpful to attempt towards a gratefulness because we stand in a long line of people trying to hold and help each other through the darkness.

I don’t need to tell many of you about how hard the season of darkness can be, or why the depths of winter – approaching the enforced jollility of Christmas – can sometimes be a very lonly place. Perhaps it was different in past, in those more connected, agricultural communities that previously celebrated the winter solstace, but then again, there are always outliers in any human grouping; those of us who are cast low or cast out.

Despite the stark beauty, winter can be cruel.

In to this dark place, the Jesus that comes through old stories (and through the lives of those trying to hold and help) is not one who makes everything ‘better’. S/he does not make the winter go away. The searing passage from the beginning of John’s gospel about darkness not being able to put out the light never pretended that darkness would not continue.

Light exists in the midst of darkness, just like solstice comes at the depth of winter.

I would like to share with you a poem, which means a lot to me. It was my attempt to banish my own winter blues and to look for light.

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Light of the world

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The low winter sun takes power from

Puddles of last night’s rain and I turn away

Resonating to signals sent from distant stars

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Something glints in the tops of bare branches –

A flash of wing or a white tooth or the

Coming together of choirs of angels

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And in a wet manger of clogged earth, summer

Sleeps, waiting for light to burst out

Brand-new hallelujahs

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For behold, the light is with us. The light is

In us. The light shines in the darkest places –

It even shines in me

When setting out on our advent journey, or any form of spiritual quest, it might be important to first let go of some assumptions about the nature of the pilgrimmage we are undertaking. For white men in particular, we must contend with a cultural inheritance based on the heros journey.

Here is the definition from Wikipedia;

In narratology and comparative mythology, the hero’s journey, or the monomyth, is the common template of stories that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed. Earlier figures had proposed similar concepts, including psychoanalyst Otto Rank and amateur anthropologist Lord Raglan.^[1] Eventually, hero myth pattern studies were popularized by Joseph Campbell, who was influenced by Carl Jung‘s analytical psychology. Campbell used the monomyth to analyze and compare religions. In his famous book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), he describes the narrative pattern as follows: A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Leaving aside the masculine grandiosity and ego-centric nature of what might be described as the hero complex, the idea of transformative struggle leading towards personal victory and public triumph over an as-yet-to-be-defined ‘enemy’ has considerable cultural power in ways which may be very unhelpful on our ordinary Advent journeys. One consequence is that we tend towards theologies of opposition in that we unconsciously set out not towards connection but towards conquest.

The prevalence of the ‘superhero’ genre within popular culture has always facinated me, at the same time as repelling me. What might this say about us? I tried to capture some of this in a poem;

Superhero



Tonight I am made new

The atomic spider bit deep, and

I am freak show, staring down from high buildings

My laser vision scans, searching

For photogenic girls to save 

From comic-cut villains, whose role is crucial, because

Every empire needs a convenient easy evil

To scare children to their beds and 

Parents to their polling booths



Yesterday I was just like you

Commuting through the same crowd towards

Jobs where work is anonymous. My weekend too

Was consumed by compensatory distraction

A movie perhaps? 

We watch masked heroes high in their 

Plastic palaces

Or zombies massing over the border wall.



If we are all extraordinary

How could I be special? 

After all, I eat communists for breakfast

We see this in part in the way that we come to define the spiritual ‘problem’ that we set out to overcome. Most religious movements see to do this – after all, our society certainly needs to address many problems, but the particuar problem focus of our hero struggle is not neutral either. Even the best heroes can cause collateral damage.

For much of my early life, the religious focus I was exposed to was the problem of sin. Particularly sexual sin, which was the worst kind. If we (or I should say if I) was purer then the world might be transformed. My job was to make others see it that way too even if I was a very flawed hero. The life-or-death nature of this struggle was after all eternal.

Later, I characterised the ‘problem’ more in terms of poverty, inequality and injustice . My job was to overcome the brutalising, degrading nature of trauma associated with these things. I worked as a social worker on the ragged edge of the welfare state, trying to rescue people (including myself.)

There is sin in this world. There is injustice. We need people to challenge and rescue, but this advent journey is not towards a battlefield, It is towards a baby.

Here is a picture of my brother holding his little nephew. I love it, in part because it captures the vulnerbility of both. It has no grand purpose, but it is laced with a deep significance, a supra-humanity.

So, shall we let go the hero, at least for a while? There may be battles ahead that need to be fought, but there is also fragility and humility to be encountered, if we lay down the swords for a while…

Can we agree that the work of our Advent season is first and foremost concerned with the search for meaning?

Did I get this right? Do I place too much pressure on what is after all a period that is already put to far too much work? Perhaps, because after all, most of us perceive the rush towards the high season as we might the landscape from a speeding car, blurred by speed and then behind us. These words are not intended to bring any more ‘should’ or ‘ought to’.

No, the search of meaning is not an obligation, it is not even a discipline (although this could help.) Rather I think of it as encounter.

Let me say more about this, using that most useful of spiritual language known otherwise as poetry;

Joy 2 

Joy is not a bauble 
Not a bubble, too soon burst 
Never manufactured cost effectively 
It is not bought or sold 
It is not gold 

Joy is not a jacket 
You pick from a handy peg, it is 
Never something worn externally 
It is always a surprise 
Like sunrise 

Joy requires no skill 
Its practice is not taught 
It is not being ‘happy’ or content 
It is just being open, to the 
Beautiful and broken 

Joy is an ambush 
Hidden in plain sight 
Wrapped up in the most unlikely things 
It often comes with grief, not even 
Promising relief 

Joy is a squirrel 
Transcending a tree 
It is music played directly on the spine 
You do not need to look, because 
It stabs you the gut 

It is just being open to the beautiful and broken. This line has tapped at me for years. It refers back to an old Henry Nowen quote in which he described these two things – the beautiful and the broken – as the primary means through which he encountered God.

Of course some of our experiences of beauty (and even a few of our experiences of brokeness) are much easier to characterise in this positive way. Sunsets, rainbows, smiling babies or crashing waves seem simpler spiritual avatars than slugs or shopping trips or our own human fragility.

We are not always open to these things. Sometimes all we can do is to put our heads down and keep moving forward and there is no shame in this. Like a walk through the dense conifer plantations here about, it is almost possible to leave the tracks laid for us. If we try, the chances are that we will be forced back onto them, scratched and bleeding, within a few hundred yards. No, we must wait for the crossroads and take the opportunity when it is offered.

Today, for instance, we travelled through the ice and snow to Glasgow, where we were trying to sell some art. We always find ourselves in lovely deep conversations with people at these events and this time I treasure the lady who wept uncontrollably after standing reading poetry on some of our pieces. I eventually asked her to tell me what it was that she had found particularly meaningful but she could not point to individual words, rather she could only describe a feeling she had that washed over her in the form of tears.

Perhaps this seems like madness. A kind of sentimental unreality arising from fanciful imagination? I would caution against such judgement however, firstly because it would be to deny the validity of what to this woman was something very real but also, despite the highly subjective nature of these kind of transcendent experiences, they can be transformative.

I do not beleieve that this woman was responding solely to any particular qualities we managed to capture or convey within our art, although it is wonderful that these seemed to help. Rather I think she was encountering what I would categorise as ‘the divine’.

The God who is in all things.

The God who loves things by becoming them.

Or, as G M Hopkins put it; the Christ ‘who plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs and lovely in faces not his...’

Let us stay open.

I am cheating today and reposting an old piece. I took a trip through some previous Advent adventures, in part to recentre myself, and discovered this…

I would contend that any journey worth making will contain elements of the spirit.

By this, I mean that it will often contain a certain depth of meaning – a kind of inherent significance that is often difficult to define and in hindsight is easily dismissed as romanticism or random seredipity.

These moments of encounter are precious, not because they imbue our ordinaryness with something that feeds our own ego; not because we can boast about them on social media or record them on our smart phones for later consumption. Rather because they draw us towards a truer form of ourselves that is not constrained by our bodies.

This is what the mystics have taught for thousands of years and whilst I can claim no great enlightenment, what I have seen and experienced fills me with something that I would describe as ordinary hope.

We are not only this.

There is not only now.

These transendent moments are fleeting. Even as I try to honour them by noting and naming them, even as I try to capture some of them in the things that I write, I must also acknowledge that I often fail to do justice to the light they bring to my life. I too easily fall back on old destructive patterns, old distractions. I too easily fall into the old dualistic patterns in which my profanity seems entire seperate from anything sacred.

Humanity is complex. It is broken and it is beautiful. It is chained and it is free. It is clever but lives in almost total ignorance. It wraps itself up in a cloak of thick cloth in a futile attempt to hide from the consequences of eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Today I want to share an old poem with you, written whilst I was on a ten day silent retreat back in 2014. The poem tries to describe an envy of wild things, whose living seems somehow more complete, more connected, more sacred. It was written from the sudden realisation that the religion I was part of had so much baggage, so many barriers and restrictions, so many uncomfortable obligations and compropmises, so much humanity. I longed for a different kind of journey.

May a bird sing an ordinary song of worship and may we hear it, as if for the first time.

The feathered Eucharist

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Happy are these birds above who

never go to mass.

Happy fragile feathered things with

light not stained by glass.

Blessed are they beak and claw; their air

Is ever sacred.

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Blessed be their treetop temple, each twig

a flying arch.

And sacred is each song that choirs

from sparrows and from larks.

Happy are the crows and cranes

Whose Eucharist is endless.

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And may the vaulted holy sky

Be full of wings as birds fly by

On their way to ruffled worship.

The boundary between seasons is always shrouded in mist, but nevertheless it seems clear now that autumn is burned out.

That great blaze of last-gasp beauty has been replaced by cold cold nights in which only the strongest stars out-compete the hooded moon.

Soon the thing will turn again. It will be wet hereabouts, but above us will turn to white.

Here, where cities and towns have thinned out only to strands, there is no hiding place from the coming of winter. It is not fooled by fire or distracted by screen. I fear it, knowing I must bear it. There is no other way.

Of course, beauty is not banished. Joy is not banished. Life does not end; rather the wildness that remains is still willd. It sleeps under surface of wood and glen, waiting.

Because we too are wild, we are not immune from winter. All we have is this; to seek meaning within it.

We look deep into darkness seeking colour and shape.

We strain for sound in silence.