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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