Advent  2010   

Marianne Worcester

So it begins, this season that tests our assumptions about everything. This season that toys with memory, and (be)longing. This season that pitches our most ‘sacred cows’ against the dark debunkers of cynicism and despair. This season that demands merriment and civility while we long for quiet thought and deep-earth slumber. This season that serves bears and tubers and leaves us hungering for light. And what a year it was, costly, costly. The good and wise, the brave, so many dear ones carried away, into the darkness they went ... I know, but I do not consent;  father, friends, relatives, colleagues,  so many washed away with 2010, back to the great ocean of Mystery from which all things come and to which we all go.

“Nothing is given that is not taken and nothing taken that was not first a gift.”  (Wendell Berry)

And yet, and yet, the year was not all loss, O surely not, for there came a child, in due time, a sweet girl, precious, gift of gifts, a baby incarnate in space and time, a grandchild for mortals.

And now a first Christmas with ... and a first Christmas without .... I accept, and I do not accept, but again I am at the altar lighting candles on an Advent wreath (O come, O come, You hoped for one) as though, as though ... I believed, or at least finally understood something of the wisdom of dark and light, dark in light. Newly vulnerable is how I feel, and ah! the harbingers, they have come, they have come indeed.  A solstice ritual, older, wiser perhaps: cavorting and laughing against the Sun's demise. At the end of this year, nothing is as it was, but what in this has ever changed?

“By expenditure of hope, intelligence, and work, you think you have it fixed. It is unfixed by rule, all is being changed.” (WB)

 The mind moves more fluently between graveyard and cradle, makes smaller journeys between the newly-arrived and the recently-departed. Memory serves up past terrain:  a shabby house in a working class neighbourhood in the kingdom of childhood, where sleep came easily in a time rich with Christmas, a table draped and heavy, rooms awash in hymns and carols, snow drifting to the window sills. Children, we floated in our mother's quilts, holy still and innocent of how the world would make us less, of how the brightness would fade, and the piano fall slowly out of tune.

But also this: there is so much more than we could ever ask or imagine. And the strangest thought, that 'something' comes out of 'nothing'. That from the humblest circumstances, the leanest times, the greatest limitations, and the weakest among us, comes Life, not just adequate, or good enough, but Abundant, over-flowing, up-welling, never-ending, Life.