The Fourth Sunday of Advent: all shall be well

There’s always something uncomfortably presumptuous in writing about pain.

I mean, I think there should be, because pain is one of the most simultaneously universal and subjective aspects of human experience. We all feel it, and yet no one’s pain is identical and no moment of pain is perfectly identical to any other. When you describe pain, there are opportunities for profound connection and fellowship—you sit with other people and talk about your pain and you see nodding heads, and maybe you even hear someone say “Oh, I thought I was the only one.” Yet when you talk about pain there’s also always the risk that someone will interpret you as thinking you’re somehow speaking with some authority, that you get it and you’re telling other people How It Is.

And this is doubly true when one is talking about getting meaning out of pain or fear or distress, because if you haven’t found meaning in your own, it can feel like an attack. Like you’re somehow doing it wrong if you haven’t found that meaning. Like your pain and fear and distress is being minimized. Like someone is telling you to get over it already.

I don’t want to do that. Everything I’m talking about here is unique to me. But that’s been the rule through all these writings: I’m talking about my own path and my own experiences on that path. If it resonates with someone else’s experience, that’s fantastic, but I’m not assuming it will. Ultimately I can speak with authority only about myself—and that barely.

That said, I think it’s very nearly a universally applicable statement to say that this year has fucking sucked.

It’s sucked because we’ve been scared and angry and isolated, because many of us have lost jobs and other sources of income and maybe friends and family members. It’s sucked because many of us have been sick ourselves and are still dealing with the after-effects. It’s sucked because the future, which already looked bleak, now looks even bleaker in so many ways.

It’s sucked also because so many of us have had to put things off. Trips, celebrations, gatherings. Things we were looking forward to have been thrown in a box with question marks all over it; we might be able to do those things in the future, but when? Under what circumstances? Who won’t be able to be present? How will those things have changed when they’re finally able to happen?

And we’ve lost time. We’ve lost a year. We’re at once locked into an awful kind of suspended animation and moving far too quickly, through time we won’t ever get back.

I was supposed to see family and friends for specific occasions this year. I was supposed to travel. I was supposed to go to cons. Probably most important to me, I was supposed to take a trip with my spouse to Portugal for our tenth wedding anniversary. That was taken away from us, and maybe it’s a small thing in the larger scheme, but every now and then I’ve thought about that trip I was so excited for, that we didn’t get to take, and my stomach literally hurts.

The word I come to, beneath the fear and the pain and the distress, is disruption. That’s what’s happened. Everything has been disrupted. An asteroid came along and slammed into us, and then it kept on slamming, and we have no choice but to bear up under it as best we can.

~

I’m fascinated by Mary.

I wasn’t always. I was raised Lutheran and Lutherans regard the whole Marian cult thing with a degree of distaste and suspicion as borderline idolatry practiced by those decadent Catholics. It wasn’t presented to me in terms nearly that harsh, but I did grow up thinking the Catholic reverence for Mary was a bit odd. And yet when you read the actual Gospels—especially Luke—she’s absolutely fascinating.

She’s also a badass.

She’s a fascinating badass from her very first appearance, when she’s visited by the angel Gabriel and told what’s in store for her. Gabriel opens with what seems on the page like good news, and she... does not react as if it is.

The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be.

I mean, given how many people in the Bible react to the appearance of angels with “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH”, that seems like, if anything, an extremely controlled and understated reaction. But I think something else is going on. I think it’s about being told that the Lord is with her. Because Mary was a Jewish girl, and one of the core experiences of being Jewish up to that point was that when the Lord is with you, shit is going to get real.

It’s not an announcement of everything being great. It’s an announcement of impending disruption of the highest order. God has noticed you, so girl? Buckle your fucking seatbelt.

It would make all the sense in the world for Mary to lose her shit. It would be 100% reasonable for her to make like Jonah and look for an out. But she doesn’t. This teenage girl facing down an angel is rightly concerned about the unsettling prospect of bearing the literal Son of God and in a way that invites shame and scandal, but in the end she shrugs and says “alright, let’s do this”.

Knowing, as she does, that all her plans are now out the window. An asteroid has just slammed into her life and nothing will ever be the same.

~

Disruption is a lack of peace. It’s discord and disorientation, distress and dread and a bunch of other D words. Most purely, it’s a loss of a center. It’s the rug being ripped out from under you, the ground crumbling away. It’s a terrifying sense of no longer being in control.

But it’s also an opportunity for revelation, because when nothing works anymore you understand things about it that you didn’t before. Among other things, you see in new ways how it already wasn’t working.

This has been especially true this year on a social level. Yet it isn’t only social. The world has broken us open on a personal, individual level; it’s possible to turn inward and perceive things we couldn’t until now. It’s possible to find a new center. The eye of a hurricane is calm. In the heart of disruption, stillness is waiting.

~

I don’t like thinking of Mary as “the Virgin” Mary, because aside from all the obvious reasons why emphasizing her virginity and purity isn’t great, it’s really the least interesting thing about her.

In a story where the men around her are constantly confused and upset and getting the wrong idea about everything, Mary is a calm center. She reacts to shocking news delivered by a terrifying messenger with astonishing coolness. There’s no indication that she’s freaking out about being on the road while heavily pregnant (WITH THE LITERAL SON OF GOD), or suddenly having to give birth in a stable. I feel like she’s the silence in the whole Silent Night thing, the peace in the midst of all this chaos. And it doesn’t come off to me like some kind of calm borne of naivety or childishness or even excessive holiness, as if she doesn’t understand what’s going on or is somehow so pure that she floats above everything.

It feels like the pragmatic calm of a girl—a woman—who does what she has to do and gets shit done when the world is falling apart around her.

Mary doesn’t radiate purity, she radiates competence. Which to me is infinitely more inspiring. Especially right now.

One of the most simply beautiful passages involving Mary actually comes toward the end of the Christmas story in the Gospel of Luke, right after the visit from the shepherds—a bunch of loud crude hairy unwashed men who were probably still all hyped up over having seen a live concert of angels in the sky—when everything is still sort of nuts:

Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.

All this wild disruption, all these exhausting bonkers-ass things happening, and in the center of it all is Mary, quietly thinking about what it all means.

~

I’ve been talking a lot about how I’ve been focusing on the waiting part of Advent. Last week I talked about the worrying that happens when you’re stuck waiting. This week I’m thinking about the despair of stasis, about how much of the last year I’ve spent feeling out of control. But as I said before: when you look at all of this through the Wheel of the Year, you see winter in a new way, as a necessary part of a cosmic pattern. The Earth needs to rest, to lie fallow. Everything needs to close up and close down. Cailleach the lady of winter walks the world until she hands things off to Brigid at Beltane.

I’m slowly forming my own image of Brigid and figuring out how my inner self responds to her; I still don’t know to what degree I might incorporate a relationship with gods into my own oddball version of Christian Druidry but I do know it’s a space I want to feel out. But I feel like I don’t know Cailleach nearly as well. Yet one aspect of her that’s pretty clear in my mind: she’s very quiet.

The world is no less chaotic now. Winter hasn’t calmed anything down. But there’s the world around us and then there’s the World, and the Wheel of the Year reminds us that there are deeper and less immediately obvious and even counter-intuitive truths about existence that we have to look for, and to which nature points the way.

I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of the Christian writer-speaker Rob Bell lately, and he says something that really resonates with me: “All is right with the world even when it’s not”.

Peace is a paradox. Just like everything else.

I’ve also been reading a recent pandemic-focused book by the Episcopal priest and ex-Dominican Matthew Fox on the 14th century Christian mystic Julian of Norwich. Julian lived through multiple waves of the Black Death, and at one point was so close to death herself that she was given Last Rites. She received visions that she called “showings”, and the literally insane thing is that in the midst of unimaginable terror and death and disruption, her visions were full of ecstatic, whole-souled love.

She writes about a God who is both Father and Mother and is in love with creation, not wrathful but infinitely merciful and universally accepting, about how she looks at the horror all around her and feels the most intense kind of hope. At a time when flagellants were wandering around beating themselves for the sins they were certain were causing the plague, she writes about a God who has already forgiven everything, who wants only the best for Their children. At a time when people were regarding a nature that was killing them with hatred and fear, Julian has the audacity to say that God is in every part of nature, that nature is sacred, that to love nature is to love and know God.

(It would be totally reasonable to conclude that the trauma of the plague simply drove her mad. That’s not the conclusion I come to, but sure.)

Julian looks at chaos and sees the sacred order beneath it. She looks at disruption and sees the stillness at its heart. She looks at what she lost and declares that nothing can ever truly be lost. And she looks at nature in all its beauty and all its dreadfulness and sees the purest expression of the divine.

This is the forgotten truth that nature-centered spirituality like Druidry invites us to remember. With its rituals, with its gods and spirits, with its calendar, with its pragmatic reverence for everything—as we enter the deepest part of winter, for me it’s pointed the way through all this disruption to the divine stillness that nature itself reflects. Today is the final Sunday of Advent, the beginning of the last week of waiting, and tomorrow is the Solstice, the stillness of the sun. Everything is disruption and it’s chaos and it’s terrible, and I still feel shitty about this year, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been able to find a place of peace in the center of it all. Now and then.

And it’s not the kind of peace that happens when you deny the chaos or you fail to understand just how terrible everything is. It’s the kind of peace that happens when you consider the chaos and you think Okay, this is real, but it’s not the whole story. It’s the kind of peace that happens when you consider the disruption and you think Okay, this is real, so let’s get shit done. It’s the kind of peace that happens when you look at an ecosystem deeply out of balance because of our selfishness and foolishness, which makes things like pandemics worse and more likely, and you think Okay, this is real, and it’s sacred. It’s the kind of peace that happens when you look at the depths of cold winter darkness in what feels like not only the longest night of the year but the longest night ever, and you think, as Alexander Shaia says, that the deepest darkness is not where grace goes to die but instead that the deepest darkness is where grace goes to be reborn.

Julian of Norwich is probably best known for one quote: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. She wrote that perfect expression of calm and peace when she had every reason to believe that nothing would be well at all.

And maybe that’s precisely why she wrote it.

Maybe she couldn’t have written it at any other time or any other way.