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.