Njordr and Odin

After the outer Feast of Saint Nicholas comes the inner rememberance of the two shadowy figures that stand behind him, Njordr, Lord of the Sea and King of the Vanir and Odin the Raider of the Heavens. Odin the proto wizard, the ancient Hermes, the Thoth of the North. He is Legba. He is the Father of More the Lies, the God of Jacob, the Tricking and Teaching One. He is not necessarily the Lord of a good Noble and Straightforward spirit.

Njordr is not Poseidon. Poseidon has not wisdom. Njordr is the Old Man of the Sea. He is Agwe. He is Nereus and Pontus himself. He is the Vanir that left the Vanir but will return to them in the end. In the Norse stories, the Vanir are a mystery. None know where the come from. The Asa are born from the Jotuns and fight the Jotuns and build the world. They fight at Ragnarok and are killed. But the Vanir are who they discover, the other gods, who live in the same land were Asgard is established. They are above the matters of the apparent world, and Njordr, who comes from them, will in the end return to them and not be part of the Ragnarok. He is of the deepest place because he is of the highest place. He is in time and the in the earth, but outside of both, being before them. This day is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and in this House Mary is identified with Our Lady of San Juan los Lagos, the Lady of the Waters, the female counterpart and otherself of might Njordr.

Advent the Tension Time

 Today is (or was) Saint Nicholas Day, the beginning of the festivities. Saint Nicholas was originally robed in green and it was Saint Patrick who was robed in red. One bishop marks the beginning of winter and the other it's ending. Nicholas, patron of stormy wintry seas in one with Njordr and Odin as well.

The last season of the year or the first depending upon how you think of it, the time of Samhain, was harder than usual, because death was more on my mind than usual. I kept thinking of losing my mother, and then I lost her, and am now living in the light of that loss, in this new world that is the same world. Advent is much more poignant season this year, but it means what it always did. We do not like the way the Great Wheel turns, and from the common vision it turns without mercy and with a total finality. But we see a mystery in the days of All Hallows which we share with Advent. We open the gates for all lost and journeying souls and at All Saints, revere and beseech souls triumphant who have reached their destination, and then on All Souls return to the memory of those lost souls, or those still journeying. 

Advent moves from the door of death to the gate of birth.We move from a mystery which is profound, but incomplete, that of death, to is other side which is not simply infant birth, but rebirth, a final birth. We look from the passing world, to the glory is it passing into. We remember that all things must end, not because ending is blessed in itself, but because they must begin again.

Advent is the tension time. We look back.... and simultaneously forward... to the birth of Jesus, to the presence of the Holy Child in our lives and in this world and he came so long ago. We believe he is coming, and yet that coming is incomplete. It is the beginning of a restoration which, somehow, is also happening, but which our eyes cannot see. We long for the possible and we long for the impossible as well, knowing that some of what we are waiting for we cannot receive on this side of things.

One of the antiphons says something to the effect of, The Lord is coming and will not delay. He will arrive with all his saints and then there will be endless day. This antiphon has always excited me, because ofcourse, we are the saints of the Lord and it means we are not only waiting for the appearance of God, but of our very selves. We do not know the world, or its real nature. We do not know life or its real nature, and in some ways we have yet to meet ourselves.

Talking to the Dead

Let's not worry tonight. You don't even know the mess you're in, or what may happen. You may have to resolve yourself to further loss.I can't think of it now, I can only think of the psalmist that says the Lord takes care of these things while we sleep. So much has not been taken care of. So much is slow acting. Lord, take care of all these things. I hand to you that which I cannot change. You have visited me both with wonders I could imagine and sorrow I hoped to allay.If someone had told me that they year my job suddenly earned the money it deserved would be the year of a worldwide plague where I would earn more money staying home than going to work, if you had said it would be the same year my mother would become sicker and sicker and die, I would not have believed it.

Mother, you said something, and I remember being so happy and saying, "So you're going to live?" because the truth is, it sounded and looked like you were on your way to death. And you said, of course. But now I suppose we both know that wasn't to be. I kept longing for you to get better, have more energy, rest, get it together for lack of a better word. And you seemed more and more tired, even more and more univested, and then Dad called me and said you were slumped in a chair and didn't want to go to the hospital and the doctor called me and said you were dying and Julie called me and said you were dead. Looking back it all seems like one thing leading to the other, but I could not have seen it when it was happening.

The question in this Advent? How is joy restored when life will not be restored. How do we go on to a happiness in life when one we loved is gone from us?

I did the vision last night. I may try to do it again this night, not directing it, just letting myself be directed.

Remembering Ad Te Levavi Sunday

This is Ad Te Levavi Week and this Sunday was Ad Te Levavi Sunday. It takes its name from the opening Introit and Gradual...

Ad te levavi animam meam non confundentur... 

I will lift up my soul to you, my God, and confide in you; I will not be ashamed, nor will my enemies. mock me.

This Sunday, the second Sunday after my mother's passing, when life is still raw and wet like hand prints in cement. I barely sang along, but lifted my heart to these words. I need this Advent. I say there is nothing left to fear, but of course this is not true. In a weakened state, in a weakened world I realize there is still a great deal to lose, much to dread. I would rather lose a limb than my eyesight. There is a contest in me of how much I could lose, what would matter, what would I trade? I think, losing a parent is enough, but then it seems that God or someone else decides what enough is, and it very often doesn't measure out fairly.

And yet, we do lift our eyes. The Greeks and the Mesopotamians and eve nthe Israelites saw in a ravished world the hand of a ravishing God, And yet, when we lift our voice and our eyes we are lifting them to one who is beyond this, one who relieves it and redeems how we cannot say, for the redemption is different for all of us. 

Tonight, the last night of the full moon, the sky finally cleared and I could see it. I dedicated my life to mr practice and demanded to be upheld despire everything happening and all the sudden changes. This world is rough one where, when I mourn, I feel I am not alone, but that we are all lamenting something. I lament every day and lifte my eyes. I witness myself as unconfounded and pray I will continue to be.

Advent Thoughts on Endings

 Katy's mother also died around Thanksgiving, eight years ago. I still don't like the holidays she says and I wonder, did my mother dislike the holidays because her own mother died around that time. She wasn't a reflective woman and it wouldn't have been like her to figure out why she didn't care for certain things, but now that she is gone and dad is pulling out decorations, I realize Mom never cared for them. She endured them. She was rarefy happy, seldom joyous. Life was a martyrdom. If my father had died, she would probably still be wailing about it.  She would always says, "I don't feel... Christmassy. I don't feel it." I suggested, once, "since you are a Christian, since you are a Catholic, maybe you feel it if you went to Mass, or if you put up a nativity scene." No, she would say, and move on. The truth is I can't have a heavenly hope for her because I don't understand her own hopes. She was Catholic, but wouldn't go to church, but would go by watching church on television. I often though there was little religion to her because she had an almost allergic reaction to it, but she did had a series of devotional books that she said she loved. I got them for her. She loved them. Last year I feared for her driving in a snowstorm. She said in the end she trusted God to bring her home and so he did. I thought God would bring her back all the time. I thought God would bring her back over and over from these sicknesses and near misses, but it is now, writing this, I realize that she always trusted God to bring her home and he finally did.The thing about my mother is that she had a hard time seeing me as another person with my own business, and I think maybe that is my problem too, that it is only now that I see that God had business with her and she had business with him, and what has happened is, at least in this world, the conclusion of this business.

First Sunday in Advent

 Wise and Foolish Virgins: William Blake

This is not the Advent I hoped for. There is always something of the melancholy but if I had pictured this day two or three weeks ago, I would have been coming from my family's and kissing my mother goodbye, waiting for her to tell me she was home safely. I would not have in the past the last week surrounding her death or the memory of giving her  ashes to my father. This will be a very different Christmas and yet, the visits to the family home, the Christmas day celebration was always only a partial celebration, often with gifts I didn't know what to do with, and things I didn't want to buy, a long night of present wrapping wearing me out. I am the only person coming to Advent with a missing family member, and every year at the holidays I would look around and think how this could be the last and we must treasure it. Well, it seems the last was the last. 

My family was not religious, or at least oddly religious. The relationship my mother had to her faith I didn't understand. She decorated joylessly for the holidays and cooked slavishly. She didn't like Christmas carols and wouldn't lay out a nativity scene.  The idea of reading the Christmas story on Christmas day really seemed to bug her. Despite her identification as a Catholic and a woman of faith, her approach to the holiday was nearly atheistic, and so there isn't much of a way in which her passing changes my observances. And yet, her passing changes my observance.

I have always struggled with the meaning of Advent. I have gone from many waves of Christianity to not celebrating it all while practicing other faiths and now, as the occulted Christian I am, the problem of Advent is before me again. Or maybe it is the problem of Christmas, the joyful day that is followed by gloomy days. Yet, in a way, every day since this plague upturned our world has been gloomy. Every day since my mother's death gloomier still. We begin this Advent in a two days after Christmas place and actually that's a perfect place because for the first time i am in the position to really examine Advent. I know what I expect of it, but what does it expect of me? What is it's promise and what does it ask?

The old and new collects for the first Sunday of Advent I use together

All-powerful God,

increase our strength of will for doing good

that Christ may find an eager welcome at his coming

and call us to his side in the kingdom of heaven.

New Translation

Collect, First Sunday of Advent

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God,

the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ

with righteous deeds at his coming,

so that, gathered at his right hand,

they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom. 

I used to irritated and put out by a church that did not celebrate the mystery of the nativity the way it did the mystery of the Passion. But now I begin to understand that the whole mystery is the mystery of the Passion. The Mystery of the Bridegroom is that of the inevitable sorrowful death of all things and life being born from it. In part the wedding is between what appears to be death, what seems to be life and the mysterious weaving of both which we still have yet to see. This mystery encompasses my sorrow and confusion, the deep ache of your losses as well. We pray together that the tender pain of this mystery which has crucified us does not make us numb or frightened, or angry, but transforms us into joy. Only God can do this, and God only comes in if we allow him through the cracks

These prayers are about being strengthened to continue the good work and the Great Work and be ready for the bridegroom when he appears.This is a prayer I need. The work is hard and the work I have been about rather artistically or in the more mundane realm of finding my family's finances and dealing with this new world we are in. That this work be done faithfully not only until the appearance of the Bridegroom, but to bring his appearance about in my life, is the greatest thing I can pray at a time like this.

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Fourth Sunday after Allantide: Christ the King... and Thanksgiving

 

The week of Christ the King is a strange one anyway. What does the feast mean, the readings about the end of time, the judgement of the world, things being rolled away like a scroll. Very often, with the compassion borne from knowing that the tragedy that befalls one could befall me, I detailed the pain in this world and how often we limp toward glory. The readings of Christ the King are end time readings of a world that is being ravished. But this year the ravishment has come close to me and my mother has died. I can barely believe I typed those words. Christ the King was fifth day of her shiva and I was and in many ways am still raw. It makes the feast of triumph and the providence of God even more confusing.

 

Of course, Christ the King is Christ the Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. The image of Christ the King is always tied to bread and wine offered on the altar of life, body and blood. Christians triumphant or wishing to be in triumph painted the image never seen in the actual Jesus. He was killed. He died. Now that I am in the eighth day of a mourning for someone who will not come back, the not quite three days mourning sounds cheap. If we seize on the story of Jesus coming back, we must understand that in many ways, no matter what your belief, he never came back. No matter how one interprets the resurrection, to really understand the grief of the disciples, one must realize in some ways, the same way my mother and your mother and your husband and your child will never come back, the Jesus they knew was cracked like a grain of wheat, gone. And so shall we be. And to find the joy and the eternal life in this most grim mystery is the heart of the Cross. This mystery of Christ the King and the rending of all things gives way, in the end, to the tiny mystery of Advent.

 

Alongside this is the tender and blessed feast of Thanksgiving. Tender because even on the first one the people celebrating it limped toward it from a year of death and suffering. Tender because I am celebrating it on the ninth day of my mother’s death with a family that honors it as their grandmother’s death day. Tender because we come from so much that has been heart and find joy and gratitude in each other. We think of those who are gone and those who will be gone and remember those times past and the year grows a little grey, a little colder. Tender.

 

And it is blest because it is the one holiday that is a holy day and the one holy day that belongs to know religion, but finds the faith, whatever that faith is, in all of us. Thanksgiving is based upon the flimsiest of prayers which is also the foundation of all prayers, “Thanks.” A thankful heart. We do not know why we were preserved for this moment, We remember those who were not, and we continue on the way. I do not know if we thank “God”. God has a way of letting us down. God is inexplicable enough to be irresponsible. A person called God let my mother die and left such a mess. A person called God let the world be ravished with disease. This person is an underachiever, and he is a convenient thing we all need to shout at, rail at, perhaps ultimately walk away from. Thanksgiving is more about finding the road to joy inside of you. Without thanks, we have no joy and without joy, we don't have much. But there is something else we whisper to, something small, that keeps us going, keeps us smiling, puts joy in us and color in bleak days, wipes away tears and exists in the goodness of those around us, in the strength we didn’t know we had. Though we are bruised and broken, confounded and hurt, we whisper thank you to this little something, this tiny secret, and hallow it, and recognize that smallness for what it is.