Saint John, the Innocents, Saint Anne the Hag and the Business of Remaking the World

 By the light, by the light, by the light of Saint John the Beloved, may we truly see.

ENTRANCE ANTIPHON           Wis 18: 14-15

Dum medium silentium tenerent omnia, et nox in suo cursu medium iter haberet, omnipotens sermo tuus, Domine, de caelis a regalibus sedibus venit.

When a profound silence covered all things

and night was in the middle of its course,

your all-powerful Word, O Lord,

bounded from heaven's royal throne.

I woke up in a bad way. After the reasonable gloom of Holy Innocents, we return to the Feast of Saint John, but something has happened and I’m going to remember it in the future because it always happens with Octaves. After the third day, the energy peters off. It seems as if an Octave should really occur in three phases, two three days and the last three days each going into something new.

 

But I’ve talked a little about that and today I thought how low we are on imagination. The Gospels, our theology, our legends, were spurred by imagination as what our childhood faith. Presumable many of us had imaginations, but then these were crushed out, often by religious authorities. What is needed is a reclamation of the religious imagination. I am thinking of the story of the Holy Innocents. What if we were to reclaim it? What if we were to retell it. Not untell it, for the telling has a great meaning, to retell it, fill in holes, make it right? Doing this in the modern day is doing what our ancestors did for centuries in a faith that was far more vivid than the one we live in. The Gospel writers who told the Gospel their own way, who saw their own face of Christ, the theologians and folktellers who shaped the stories we know, knew also, better than we, the meaning of “God putting such power into the hands of men.”

 

Imagine another story. Imagine that the Wise Men really are wise and they don’t need visions and dreams to know to leave a different way. They already understand the wickedness of Herod. They didn’t know much about the Roman Empire, and Herod, knowing these were Parthians and powerful men didn’t have the nerve to shadow them to closely.

 

Joseph’s wisdom may be attributed to angels in dreams, but this time the dreaming messengers are the Magi who tell Joseph he must flee. Joseph waits a day. So much to pack. The angel confirms his fears. Consumed by fear as he is, Mary is full of spirit and reason.

     “Has it occurred to you?” she asks, calmly, “that if Herod does not find our baby, he might not stop and killing EVERY baby?” This has been in her mind already, since the Magi arrived. She grew up in Jerusalem. She knows Herod.

     But they did not travel alone. Why does everyone assumed they came to Bethlehem alone? In this time it is Anne as the wise crone, good Saint Anne,who says, perhaps with cousins, perhaps with Joachim, “You must go. You must go right away.”

     “But, Mother—”

     “We will go, your father and I will. We will move through the town—it is a small one—and warn the women to hide their children.”

     Not all the women listen, or are able to hide their children. The slaughter of the innocents, which medieval artists in their desire to portray bloodbaths and make an army of infant martyrs, are wrong. In the end the number of children dead is around three. This is why it’s never reall talked about anywhere but Matthew.

     Only three, well then why the business about a loud cry in Ramah? But listen, is the death of three or two or one child, the wailing of one family nothing?

 

Why do the work of changing the story, or adding to it. Because this is the work religious people have always done, because to add to this story is to add to how we see God working in the world the story portrays, to add to how we see ourselves working to bring about grace as well. To tell a story where Mary is thoughtful, the wise men wise and Anne saves as many people as possible if far different from the brief slaughter house tale we get in Matthew and the God is different and the world as well.

 

Here into this story I have introduced the Hag, Anne as the Grandmother of the World. The Hag of Winter is an important person we have overlooked, and now we come to her. In this next wheel of the Octave, as we go deeper and deeper, we seek winter wisdom from the Hag.

At this point in Christmas, we must go beyond the Bible. We have to go beyond the Gospels and the originating Christian theology, because Christmas was a thing that invaded Christianity. The birthday of the Lord was not something that was celebrated naturally, and it’s always been a bit of trouble to Christians. Can we hold onto this thread of the Nativity. See where it leads, what it tells us?

 

Christmas is the celebration of a very small and fragile beginning. To celebrate is to observe, the keep, to hold. To celebrate is also to maintain a light for the little light, to foster it. The lantern Joseph carries is the lantern shielding the Christ Light, the light of the Christ Child for extinction. A little child shall lead them, but when he does, what a strange following, an almost doomed following. This fragile beginning looks like the end. Much is the same. Not only is old Herod still king, but he has the power to slay. The shepherds have the message of a child born to be shepherd of all, but what can this child do? Mary’s message is one of expectant pain. The peace on earth, though a declaration is one scarcely heard and seldom obeyed and the angels cannot be seen by those not looking. The miracle is easy to miss and not only easy, but missed. Belief is to travel beyond your own mind, well, in keeping this feast I am traveling beyond my own mind, my own sight, my own ability. I strike the wall of grief, despair, boredom and then must move past it with faith. And faith is not some dumb belief in facts, but the active moving into another state. It is good to remember that, right now, we are in the business of remaking the whole world.

After Holy Innocents

 

Medieval image representing the Great Work

It is called the Work because it is hard and the Great Work, presumably, because the work is constant. This is hard work. Easy work if work at all is having one day of Christmas and celebrating. But the work of, in the modern world, keeping the festival for eight days, examining its many nuances, returning to the altars and the liturgies with new questions, is a work indeed, the work of doing this in a world where no one else really is, that is a work too. The work of digging deep down to find and remember your own power… all of this is work. The work of finding a different joy in Christmas which is not the exact joy of Christmas Day… all of it work.

     The Gospel of Thomas says: Jesus said: He who seeks, let him not cease seeking until he finds; and when he finds he will be troubled, and when he is troubled he will be amazed, and he will reign over the All.

     He does not say, but implies, that when you are troubled you are onto something, and in these days I come a wall and am troubled. It is as if the first round of celebration is over and I must go deeper. The first things are not enough, the first ways of celebrating, of thinking, or hoping and praying are not sufficient. The questions I began to ask but which had no answers are not enough. Some answers are required. Some questions must change. Who is the God of this season? The Little Child, the Holy Child? What does that mean? What good is this Child to me?

     The Child is made by me. Everytime we draw the circle, lift the chalice up and bring it down, place the dagger in the chalice, have the communion cup we are bringing the Child into being. This is an old teaching. All of our magic is the Holy Child, the marriage of our will with the divine will, earth joined to heaven, the presence of God in the midst of our workings. This is the totality of magic. Christmas is the magic moment, the moment when we must see that God is the high priest of this ritual and the world is altar. When I work it, I work in memory of him and under his leadership. When I bring the Holy Child into my world in the seemingly small ways, I am participating in the huge universal way he is doing this himself.

     The Holy Child is also the reminder that this is the beginning of things, the start of the working. When we come to the altar that is the Nativity of things. Be patient. The world is beginning again, but the old world has just passed. We can still smell the brimstone of it. We still remember the deaths. These days of Yule, also called Christmastide, are a constant reminder to renew, to leave the old world behind.

 

It seems that many years we skip over Saint John’s Day, but Holy Innocents is always there, and there at that right time when the cycle of first joy from Christmas is turning into something old, something that makes us sad, something where the holiday’s gloss is gone and promise unfulfilled. Holy Innocents is absolutely about a promise unfulfilled. It is the after story of Epiphany, so to speak. The Wise Men, not being particularly wise, are fooled by Herod and go to Bethlehem to worship Jesus. In the story they are warned in a dream not to go Herod, but they don’t seem to tell Mary and Joseph about this dream. They also seem to have no intuition. Next, Joseph is told by an angel, assumedly Gabriel, to take Mary and Jesus and flee to Egypt. Is this on the same night? Who knows? Was Egypt essential? Was Herod this obsessed with a baby? According to this story he was. He wakes Mary and Jesus, they feel to Egypt with all symbolism. Herod, enraged, kills all the children in Bethlehem two years and under, though it seems like a few three years old would have been bopped off too.

    

Are we to take this story as fact? It’s only in one Gospel. We celebrate Epiphany, though, and it is, after all, in a Gospel, so we sort of have to honor it. Regardless of the factuality of this particular story, the story is true. Innocent, children and otherwise have been killed. The little town of Bethlehem how still we see thee lie, is cursed by the coming of Jesus and experiences a blood bath. The Catholic Church with its love of martyrs, uses its antiphons to spin meaning from the tale, but the truth is this is a story about the failing of God because the people of God fail. The wise men are not wise. Joseph does not think of other children or other women who may be in danger. The Blessed Mother and Jesus whom we turn to for protection and—it seems who often fail in this department—are merely a girl and a baby fleeing the scene of danger.

 

Holy Innocents does demand the question that a few days of Christmas would? What Child is this and of what use is he? By now it’s fair to ask this question. Or, put another way, who is the God of this Feast? Who do we cry out to. The Child cannot help us, not yet, the Child of our longing must be fostered. The mother is just a girl, even she is in no position to help. Who do we cry to? The angelic guardians, older mothers? Wiser fathers? Saint Brigid the burning fostermother of the Lord? Even Hermes/Adonay the shepherd. What of the ox and the ass? Who are these? While we adore the Child in the manger, we look about the manger for those Lord who assist, who are hidden behind words and statues and songs.

 

And so we go deeper.

Sunday in the Octave of Christmas: the Mystery of the Beginning of the New World

 

The day after Christmas is euphemistically called Boxing Day, and I think this is because it was the day when people put used food and old gifts into boxes and distributed them to the poor so they could have a Christmas too. I love Boxing Day. I love that a day is dedicated to being the Day After Christmas. The day of sleeping in and eating leftovers and doing very little. The day of listening to the radio and watching movies and recovery.

But Boxing Day is the Feast of Saint Stephen, protomartyr. Poor Stephen has the same fate as everyone born on the day after or the day before Christmas. We sleep through his day. There is a lesson in his day, the lesson of the joy of the Christ Child’s birth,  which had made the whole world new being linked with the same old killing of things good and pure, the lesson that Stephen has the hope of heaven in his death and his death is not in vain and yet, being so close to Christmas the ultimate lesson of Christmas swallows up Saint Stephen’s Day. The joy of the new birth swallows up the sad story of death and makes a sort of mockery of it.

So instead we have Boxing Day. Christmas was bright and full of light, blue sky over white, sparkling snow. Christmas Eve the sky was pale purple with snowclouds. Saint Stephen’s Day is grey and tells us to go back to sleep. There is good news and a new world, but we cannot comprehend it right now, so please have another sandwich, a nap and a beer. This is the day that Mary and Joseph and shepherds who had heard a strange tale were also left unable to comprehend and could only do what we humans do to live, eat, breathe, rest, be kind to one another, muddle through, put vast decisions and meditations off for another day until we have the resources to understand a little more.

In these first few days I am trying to understand this hope in my heart, trying to realign my prayer and my working the light of hymns which are homely as well as majestic, hopeful as well as deeply sorrowful, tracing my way through the holy darkness of the midnight mass where light has sprung. I live in hope, unable to articulate the dimensions of this hope, and away from the liturgical celebrations, eating and feasting and sleeping and enjoying the days, I cannot explain the hope either. So I turn to silence and writing.

John F Baldovin points out that in an octave feast like Christmas or Easter the point is we are all in one great day. Christ was not born Friday at midnight a day ago or almost two days ago as it nearly eleven pm on Saturday. Christ is born today. He is born as this evening we repeat the midnight service at five while light goes to darkness. We are still coming to understand this extended day. We will never stop coming to understand it, not really. And this day is still going on and will still be going on Monday morning when the normalcy of life takes over, when the aggravations come. This day does not stop being this day even when the full force of the sorrows of the world enter and, of course, this makes sense, for this is the day not only that the Lord made, but that he chose to come into. That is the blessedness of Christmas, that the world is blessed because God proclaims it blessed. He does not consent to come into it, but longs to come into it. This life we are so indifferent to or that we despise, he is drawn to. This life, this world is hallowed not only because he enters it, but because he declares it hallowed by desiring to enter it.

For the last month we have celebrated waiting for the Lord. Now we celebrate that the Lord has come. Up until Yule we celebrated the closing of the year and the ending of the world. Now we celebrate the birth of a new one. And yet, the world before and the world after looks something the same. Feels the same. Is the same. How they are not the same, how we can look into the world we’ve always seen and know a new one is the mystery of Advent and Christmas.

Yule Thoughts

 The Yule King: Michael Kerbow

On the longest night of the year I listened to a horrible lessons and carols. I surrounded my self in other stories I hadn’t heard and gired myself with light and food. They say we are going into the time of darkness, though for months now every night was dimmer and every night was darker, you have to pull the weights off your back. They say winter is on its way and hardship may come but they don’t know the hardship has happened. You make merry to chase this winter away, but you sing to remember you’re still here. Remember every day the white snow falls is every day the day grows longer, remember the you that you were and look at the you you are, remember how impossible resurrection seemed and then look at the scars all on your hands and see printed in your palms something like rejoicing.

 

In Hinduism and Sikhism as well as some forms of Buddhism and Jainism, the festival of Devali sweeps across India. Southeast Asia does what we have forgotten we did as well in the west. The festival exists before the religion explains it. The coming of the new religions alters it, often adds to it so that the festival is not exactly the same for all celebrating it. But it is the same festival and we are all celebrating it together and in this world we live in, the one time of year which has inherited this is the season called Christmastide or Yuletide. I saw a group of heathens who had done a Yuletide gathering which looked very fun but nothing like Christmas, and this is great for them, but for my Yule and Christmas are basically one. There is honoring of the Yule Ones, or the Jolnir, but this is also the first night the Christ as the Child on the Back of the Stag is brought out, the beginning of moving from waiting to contemplation, the first midnight service, the first sunrise one.

            Last night, in the mellow midnight darkness, as the frankincense burned we sang: What Child is this? And that is the question I am confronted with. What child is this? What is this celebration? What is happening to me? To us?” The first answer and the quickest one is that he is Himself, a mystery to be lived in and not a thing to be solved. The Child is whom he shows himself to be and we must sit before him awhile. He is difficult to contemplate so we rush past him.

            The Child is useless to us. The child shows up outside of the Bible, and inherited icon. The theological explanation moves us from contemplating the Child to his growing up and being crucified and rising, being a grown up and therefore useful God. We want to use the Child. I want to use the Child. How long can you adore a child? Frankly, I’ve never had much use for babies. What do I do with one even if it’s God? What does it mean? What does it mean when Christ comes into this world? What in the world are the lessons a baby, no matter how divine, can teach?

            Krishna at least walks and talks and is blue and does precocious things. The little lord Jesus? We must take his lordship on faith. He is no fake baby. The Child is a Child. We need not answer the questions just yet, but it is worth taking a stab at them eventually. We need not come to the right conclusion or conclusions. To be open is enough.

 

On Yule the world ends and the world begins again. The new world we wake up in has all the residue of the new one. If we remember from the old stories this is how it always was. God created the world from chaos, Noah and his children stepped out onto a world ravaged by the Flood. This year there is the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, a shining star, something worth taking as a sign. We are solemn in prayer, merry in celebration. Both things are necessary. The new world ought to be celebrated. Without celebration there is no energy to create the new world. The newness is the Child. The world is new because of the Child. The Child is the very blessed Presence that seemed beyond us, quietly in our midst. Later, in the Gospel of Mark when Jesus heals a paralytic, we will thank God for putting such power in the hands of men, but right now we are amazed that God has put himself in the midst of us. The earth, called the dirt, called lowly, has met with the dew and they have both brought for the Just One. That the Child is Son of God and Son of Man, is a great mystery, a joy. We do wrong when skip past that moment to the Crucifixion and the Passion, We do wrong when we skip them. We miss the meaning of both when we ignore one and do not live with the other.

            The idea that Jesus died for us, the strange idea of substitution sacrifice which is the invention of later Christians more than of the Gospel, is a shame to God and to us. The idea that Jesus was walking to his death, knowing that was the result of doing what he must do, taking the stand he was required to, is wonderful, meaningful, bears truth and seems to be the point of the Gospel of Mark. But even this is eclipsed by Christmas, We are not saved by his hanging nor are we saved by our doing and following. We are saved, heaven and earth are made one, the angels are seen to sing, by this being born in the flesh. The other things are what we do as a result of this miracle, not something meant to bring it on.

 

                       

Rorate Sunday

 

This is a wartime Christmas. This is not a Christmas where I have been overworked and am on my way to back to work which wearies me, thinking of a terrible winter at work, thinking of a world that is unredeemed. This is a time of war. This is a time of magic and prayer and concentration and determination.I think before Christmas has been a semi terrified retreat into childhood and a fight against the horrible things. But a few weeks ago the horrible thing happened and this is new territory. At the very beginning of the year I was terrified. Around Easter I was absolutely frightened because of COVID and not really frightened of getting it, but of passing it on and killing my parents, especially my mother. All this year the possibility of my mother's death hung like--not pun intended--a spectre, but now she is gone and the life I feared is the life I am living in everyday. This year is the world I prayed would not come. I live in that world every day ,and every day I discover something new, a new strangth, a new magic, a new resolve.I get to the end of myself, to the end of things, to the end of great grieving and terror. And I find new country. The country is not always beautiful. It is often ugly rough country. I need determination to walk through it or wait through it. The determination comes. I need patience and faith in a place where nothing is stable but me and this quiet internal temply that I build.

I prayed over and over for my mother to live, and she did live, but then I knew that this prayer must have one end sooner of later. One night, after being overcome with worry and fear I released herself and myself from this prayer. She was dying the next dead and dead that day after.So that is my loss, my little loss in the great work. But in the time of trial so many other things are happening, slowly. This president who has shamed the nation is leaving and things are not getting good or necessarily better, but they are moving away from the downward spiral. There is so much left to do. So much left to do to make it on earth as it is in heaven. And my devotion to this has been weak, and my fire has burned low. As Advent draws to a close I am steering away from the Christmassy feeling and moving toward the resolve of determination.

Well, where does lying in bed eating chocolates and wearing wooly socks fit into this? Where does a big greedy Christmas Day meal fit into this, and naps and hiding from the world? I think because we need rest. A bear needs to hibernate in order to be a bear. The Sabbath of joy is absolutely necessary for the slow work of change and protection and nurture. In the Lord of the Rings it is Aragorn I think who says that the Hobbits are stupid and well fed and comfortable and don't know much about the world and so despise the Rangers, but that this is fine because the work of the Rangers is to keep the Hobbits and other people safe and therefore stupid. I've always had a problem with this. It just sounds wrong. But one thing it does is create a dichotomy between the Rangers and the protected. The comfort of Christmas is a self protection, a self nurture. One who fights, who works, who creates visions and lives by them cannot do so successfully if he does not also live a life of comfort and joy and celebration. One who only struggles, works and suffers will most certainly lose his soul in the process of trying to save it. 

Scenes from a Rorate Mass early Saturday morning before Rorate Sunday

Gaudete

Last night, as I prepared for the morning of Gaudete Sunday and decorated the house, I was beginning to feel a profound joy and hope even after the last few weeks. This is a strange year for me, but really like every year for many people, like a year in general. The first month of mourning for the death of my mother ends the same night as the O Antiphons for the approach of Christmas begins. This means that even as I go through the rituals of Advent and the approach of the Child Jesus, I am in mourning for the death of my mother. This reminds me a lot of Jewish prayer where one recites mourner's Kaddish along with the blessings which accompany the acknowledgement of births and turns of good fortune. You stand with others mourning and celebrating at once, realizing life and death are part of an often painful whole.

A pin is pricked in this celebration when a friend who was always a little troublesome, always sort of wicked and keen to do horrible things at the worst times, betrays me. I learn about it the night before and am dealing with it this morning as I light candles for the Gaudete service. Through the late morning and the afternoon I attempt reconciliation, process the true wickedness of this person and then send them out of my life. While moving from the late afternoon to the early evening and the virtual Lessons and Carols service, my heart, already exhausted from death and mourning and the worries around family, is still further exhausted by this betrayal. 

I cannot remember which reading it is, probably the one from the Book of Revelation that reminds me of the root of the joy at this time of year. I want a time when I am not constantly turning over the death of my mother in my head. I want a time when I am more reconciled to it, when it is well in the past and when my father is settled and I don't worry about him because he has the help he needs. I want a time when we can see we have come through this. But that is not what the joy is about. That is not what we are awaiting. In Advent we are training our vision, our hope and our determination because we are awating new heavens and a new earth, we are comminitng to a change beyond ourselves. We are welcoming a birth we hardly know about. As the light increases we pray that the light will increase in our hearts. In Advent we are learning to hope in a world that is hopeless. We are being taught to see in a world which distrust vision. In a world where there is little left to say, we are praying to become prophets.

So, how does one move prophetically in a world where often we can barely move at all. We move step by step. moment by moment, in response to the faithful vows we once made. We remember our vocation and honor the cathedral nature of it. Cathedral nature? The nature of medieval people who knew they might not live to see the end of their cathedral building work, and knew that the part they did, though often small, was integral, and so did the work anyway.

Turkish writer and activist Ece Temelkuran once spoke of a woman who was planting a garden in a refugee camp in the Libyan desert. She said this was a lesson on determination and that determination was the right word because the word hope is too small. But I disagree. Hope is just the right word, just big enough, And so, as we light these candles and quiet our souls, as we embrace the pain inside of us and wash off the shit we no longer need to carry, in the third week of Advent we train ourselves in the very fierce art of hope.

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.