day 3: for change

The ancient Christian monastic traditions, especially desert, Celtic, and Benedictine, offer great wisdom for the journey of unfolding. They understood that the soul’s ripening is never to be rushed and takes a lifetime of work. The gift of the contemplative path is a profound honoring of the grace of slowness. 

We can grow impatient when life doesn’t offer us instant insights or gratification. We call on the wisdom of these monks to accompany us, to teach us what it means to honor the beauty of waiting and attending and witnessing what it is that wants to emerge, rather than what our rational minds want to make happen. The soul always offers us more richness than we can imagine, if we only make space and listen …for what is appropriate for this particular season of our lives.

..I have come to embrace words like ripening, organic, yielding, and unfolding as ways of understanding how my soul moves in a holy direction. …Honoring the flowering of spring and the fruitfulness of summer, alongside the release of autumn and the stillness of winter, cultivates a way of being in the world that feels deeply reverential of my body and soul’s own natural cycles. We live in a culture that glorifies spring and summer energies, but autumn and winter are just as essential for rhythms of release, rest, and incubation. When we allow the soul’s slow ripening, we honor that we need to come into the fullness of our own sweetness before we pluck the fruit. This takes time and patience.

Christine Valters Paintner, The Soul’s Slow Ripening

I traditionally find the winter period difficult (November to February particularly). It is when depression settles bone-deep with the help of SAD (seasonal-affected-disorder). It is when chronic pain flares in the colder air, and I am even less mobile.  

But in the last couple of years I have been deeply fortunate to have found guides to lead me through this period.  In 2022 my guide was Christine Valters Paintner (my Abbess at the Abbey of the Arts), who was workshopping her ideas for her book A Midwinter God.  This coincided with me writing a cycle of poems from winter Solstice to summer Solstice, with the working title of ‘making my own constellation’.*  It was a time of great struggle but great soul-shifts too.  

In 2023 I followed the recommendation of Christine Sine from Godspace, and made an extended pilgrimage through Celtic Advent with David Adams, helping myself by drawing  my own reflections in an accordion sketchbook as I went.

I am drawn to the way the Celtic traditions are rooted in the landscape and the seasonal rhythms of the year.  It surprises and soothes me to realise that when, unthinkingly, I see November as marking the year’s decline, the Celts marked early November as Samhain, and the middle of the month is when their Advent rituals begin (40 days before Christmas).  The two are intimately connected.  Samhain marks the beginning of the ‘dark year’, (as opposed to the ‘light year’ which is May to October)**, but crucially, this is also the beginning of the whole year; the dark cycle comes before the light.  It is no mistake that the Anglican Church Calendar also runs from Advent to Advent.  I begin my journey into holiness in the darkness amidst the possibility of loss, emptiness, unknowing and mystery.  In the Irish Tradition, I wander through this time ‘for the sake of Christ’ on peregrinato, and David Adams notes that on peregrination ‘a person may take years of journeys before settling into the “place of their resurrection”’: the place where my ministry can take flight, take root, the place where one is whole and at home in the Beloved.

I begin my Advent journey of waiting, not knowing for whom I wait.  

I begin my Advent journey in the crucible of change, knowing nothing stagnates in the soul (no matter how it feels).  

I begin my Advent journey by making myself comfortable with the uncomfortable, mysterious dark.  I am not yet sure whether I am nestled beneath the soil, or lying exposed beneath the expanse of stars.  

I begin my Advent journey with the stillness that is accepting of constant change.

There were safer places
more comfortable places
palaces and wealthy places
Yet you chose a daughter of the soil
Who would have otherwise
lived a good and honest life
grown and harvested crops
cooked and washed and cared for others
and been forgotten
to be your temporary home
to be exalted for all time

My soul glorifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant.
From now on all generations will call me blessed

When does an ordinary life
Become extraordinary
An mundane day
Become revolutionary
A moment in time
Change history?
When God enters in
Forgives sin
Allows us to
Begin again
When we repeat
Those words of Mary
‘May it be to me
As you say’

God of creation, God of Salvation
Who speaks to us through thunder and whisper
Who loves us as if there were but one of us to love
Hear the prayers of our hearts

May God the Father bless us;
may Christ take care of us;
the Holy Ghost enlighten us all the days of our life.
The Lord be our defender and keeper of body and soul,
both now and for ever, to the ages of ages.

(Æthelwold c 908-984)

www.faithandworship.com

* I hope to use these as source material for a future #adventapertures – so watch this space … meanwhile me reading a couple of them are on my YouTube channel here.

** If you would like more information, a couple of years ago I wrote a series of pieces on this blog marking the movement of light across the year using the Celtic calendar as a guide, and you can find those pieces here.

windward (iPhone image)