My older son used to sing with a youth chorus that performed twice a year in a nearby United Methodist church. One spring, the concert happened to land during the Lenten season. My younger son was about ten and already a cantankerous little atheist.
He surveyed the scene from our perch in the balcony.
“What heck? What are all those rocks and sticks and purple banners doing down there?”
I explained about the rhythms of the liturgical year and the colors of Advent and Lent, the waiting seasons.
He listened quietly, and then slowly turned his gaze toward me. With a voice full of admiration and surprise and awe, he whispered, “Wow. You really know your stuff.”
I remember that scene every year when I get out the Advent candles and purple cloth—not because of any puffery on my part about knowing my stuff. But because it so delights me, his comic delivery and his surprise that I knew anything at all.
Tomorrow is the second Sunday of Advent, and I only brought down the purple box from the attic this morning. And for the first time in decades, I didn’t order the special candles in time.
Yesterday afternoon I logged about three miles scampering back and forth between the concert hall I manage and the chapel where our choir is performing tonight. Those buildings are not that far apart!
Yes, I had a lovely time resting with friends on the Oregon coast during the Thanksgiving break, but I’ve been in a literal dead run ever since.
What I want is quiet, some space to prepare and think and read. I absolutely believe Reverend Harrison Warren—that the dark season is a time to “lean into an almost cosmic ache: our deep wordless desire for things to be made right and the incompleteness we find in the meantime.”
In these last few years especially, my coping mechanism for dealing with the chaos has been irreverence. (Which might account for the general confusion caused by my church attendance.) Take the feast day of St. Nicholas, for instance:
(Joke, people. Joke.)
And in the last several years, since the cancer and the deaths and the mortal peril, it’s become tradition to have a War on Christmas internment camp as our centerpiece at the table.
(This morning my former favorite student messaged to say that she’d bought me some Reigelein chocolate Santas. Bless.)
Yesterday after my first trip to the chapel I was able to sit down for half an hour to listen to an organ recital, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel: The Great “O” Antiphons.” Ah, I thought. This will be lovely. I was ready to sink into my breathing and the music and a moment of peace.
But then, during the second piece, I became slowly aware—good golly, I hate this. I’m only marginally musically literate, but I know who to ask for musical intel. But I haven’t had the time, frankly, to ask what it was that made me so uncomfortable. Dissonance, probably.
At any rate, I decided to just lean into it, the cosmic ache, knowing that when it was over we would sing together, O Come, O Come.
Longing and aching for the light—that sounds about right.
Oh. So many thoughts. 1) I love dissonance. 2) Why am I teaching writing when YOU write so beautifully? 3) I need a Christmas internment camp. 4) Lunch date.
1) I’m not so good at dissonance, especially cognitive, but I’m trying to be open. 2) I’d probably be shite at teaching writing. “Look around. Listen. Write it down. Done.” 3) Everyone needs the internment camp! 4) Next week is pretty wide open for me. Let me know!
If ever I attend mass again, it would be for midnight mass and I’d add my dissonance to Oh Come, O Come Emmanuel. 😀
Ha!