Advent Begins

 

It was some time in early summer that the Witch Craft   sailed away from the common shore with Christianity, the most open western tradition, but as the summer turned to winter and we left 

Extraordinary Time, once again approached that old common shore, the time where we celebrate not only what other people celebrate, but where our altars look surprisingly like Christian altars and what we are doing is not so much the opposite or the extra of Christianity as something like a deeper faith. We pass Michaelmas and then come to Allantide, and now, after Thanksgiving, we sail into Holy Friday and the first Sunday of Lent, welcoming the Virgin, the Child and he Gift Giving Old Man to our altars. The Witch Craft touches familiar shore, and the carols casually sung take on deeper meaning. Red and green and green in the form of evergreen enter the house and we wait for the gifts and blessings of the Small Folk as we make our offerings.

But what is Advent? It is, as Shani Oates writes on her Clan of Tubal Cain page, the beginning of the Tide of Hope, and maybe that is the problem of it, problem in the old sense of the word, problem as riddle and challenge and mystery. At these times of the year when what I do is so close to what I once did, I am listening to an Anglican sermon where the priest is trying to figure out what Advent means. There is the problem of the fact that once Christians expected the emanate return of Jesus, and a return that had nothing to do with babies in mangers or Christmas trees. There is the problem of a hope that the whole world will be changed, its very nature, that God will show his fae and right wrongs and that we know this will not happen by the 25^th of December?

            That is the Christian problem of Advent, but what is he witchly problem? What is the witchly meaning? Decorating the altar, and singing the old tunes, watering an unloved sapling and setting it up in my apartment, I wondered, what is this all about? My heart feels hopeful? But what am I hoping for, and why do we are we suspicious of hope? The writer Ece Temelkuran declares that hope is not strong enough, that what is required is determination, and I think this is what we all fear, that hope is for children, that grown ups do more than hope, or that grown ups are over hope. We act. We are practical. We do not wait. We do not expect. The vague feeling of hope is not enough.

            But what these weeks tell us that this is not true, or rather, that if hope is not enough, then whatever is enough cannot exist without hope. Hope is the ground and beginning place, and of course it is for children, but this why this time of the year is the time of the Holy Child, and why the Virgin Mother invites us all to become that Child.

            Years ago, I said something and my mother asked me, “Who said that?” I said, “Jesus.” She shook her head, put down her cigarette and said, “I’m sorry, but he was wrong.”

            Jesus also said that in order to enter into the Kingdom of God, one must gain the heart of a child.”

            Advent is telling as that sometimes Jesus gets it right.