Advent, my favourite liturgical season, is upon us. I appreciate this time of year for the warmth and coziness 1) afforded by the cooler weather and 2) of nostalgia – my conscious journey home to the Catholic Church began in Advent 2006.
Advent is also my favourite season because every year without fail it draws me into a certain mode of reflection and contemplation, one similar to but less foreboding than the kind Lent conjures. That said, both seasons draw me into the practice of waiting. Both draw me into remembering death.
Lent is a time not only which challenges us to spiritually die to ourselves through our observances of fasting and penance, but which also draws our attention to our very physical mortality as we are invited to walk with Jesus towards and through his passion and death.
Advent – liturgically a season of darkness and of waiting – is matched perfectly, at least in this climate zone, with mother nature’s season of gradual fading, of return to sleep.
The melancholic in me cannot help but to associate the barrenness and dormancy of fall and winter with death. I think it was Edgar Allan Poe who called sleep “little slices of death.” And so to me, Advent with its backdrop of fall and winter, prefaced with the honouring of those gone before us on the feasts of All Saints and All Souls, is, like Lent, also a sort of preparation for the death that ultimately awaits us all.
Have I made you uncomfortable by associating Advent with death? If so, wait. Please don’t look so fast to Christmas. I invite you to remain just a little bit in the discomfort of that truth (that is, death), long enough to light four candles this season, long enough to really experience the glory of the fifth Christmas candle at its proper turn.
One cannot skip ahead to and fully embrace the joy of Easter without walking the sorrows of Lent, just as one cannot skip ahead and embrace fully the joy of Christmas without walking the sorrows that even Advent connotes. During both Lent and Advent, we are invited to wait and to look for the light of comfort that is always accessible even in darkness.
Allow me to share with you my experience of this past Lent/Easter as it connects to my experience of this coming Advent/Christmas, including all its nuances, both impoverished and rich.
This past Lent was the most desolate one I have known in my 15 years as a Catholic.
It began with a violent bear attack on our family’s five beloved pet bunnies. I will never be able to reconcile with such destruction, not even amongst the wild. My soul is wired for the tenderness and docility of Isaiah 11:6.
As a survivor of abuse, I also began Lent with processing the death of what I thought I knew of myself, of those who I thought I knew growing up, and of those closest to me now.
The persistent interior struggle – which I have never before been able to explain but have always felt I had to mask in order to survive in a world which rejects and denies our very real human frailty – now makes sense. All I can say is that going back to one’s family of origin, of facing and growing up and out of one’s demons, those generational sins and parasites, is hard but worthy work and only possible by the strength and grace of God.
Then on Palm Sunday, I was made aware of the heavy cross borne by a most beloved and trusted father figure. Learning of this news was harder on me than my cousin’s death earlier that Lent, than of my uncle’s suicide that very Holy Week. There would be a parting with this beloved father figure. There has been a parting. In my little ways, I have and will do my best to continually bear his cross with him, in love and in prayer.
Death, goodbyes, loss, and grief. They follow us no matter the season. Some seasons, like Lent, their reality just happens to be starker. But light can be had because God faithfully and always provides a means of relief to that which to us is insufferable and unbearable (1 Cor 10-13).
I cannot tell you of all the Easter blessings that have come with all the Lenten curses. The blessing that I will share is the one which joins my Lent to my Advent, my Easter to my Christmas. It is the wonder of the new life within me.
As I sleepily took in Easter Vigil Mass at Westminster Abbey, not quite awake from the shock and stupor of Lent, I was intuitively aware of the miracle inside my womb. Right upon Easter after the desolation of Lent, God gifted us with the knowledge of this child to represent the hope and joy of the Resurrection, due on Christmas day.
And so here I am, encouraging you, encouraging myself to fear not the darkness, to deny not the struggle, to – while we are being uncomfortably molded and formed – seek and hold onto the light that can oftentimes only be perceived in contrast to that which is difficult and dark.
God is with us, now and for always.
Jen Spicer lives in Mission.