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.