The Third Sunday of Advent: therefore do not worry

do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed--
or have you too
turned from this world--

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things? 

— Mary Oliver, “The Sun”

(Note: I think this actually might be part one of a two-part piece, this one starting in a tightly focused place and the next ending in a much bigger place next Sunday before the Solstice, so stay tuned for that.)

I fucking hate waiting.

Which makes it a little uncomfortable that we’re in the middle of a period which is, in both the Christian calendar and the Pagan Wheel of the Year, literally about waiting.

I’ve talked about this before, about how Advent is obviously about waiting but so is the no-time period between Samhain and Alban Arthan (Yule). And in fact, really one could extend that period back to the Autumnal Equinox, Alban Elfed (Mabon). Samhain is when the strange no-time between the end of the old year and the beginning of the new happens, but starting with the moment the days begin to get shorter, the Wheel is looking and turning forward to the moment when they begin to lengthen again.

I used to hate that period of waiting before becoming a Druid—low-key before Christmas and then high-key after Christmas once I no longer had Christmas to look forward to. But one of the things that’s been so wonderful about walking a Druid path is the return to that fundamentally Pagan connection to the cyclical rhythms of the Earth, a sort of full presence in time that I don’t recall ever feeling before. I’m aware of the changing seasons in a way I never was until finding Druidry—not merely aware that they’re happening but aware of the passage of time through that change. Once the celebration of Alban Elfed is done, I begin thinking about the observance of Samhain. Once Samhain is done, I begin thinking about the celebration of Alban Arthan. This isn’t in terms of impatience but in terms of thinking about what that next festival day will mean to my experience of time, and in particular what it means in the context of the other days.

Alban Arthan means what it means in part because time connects it to Samhain. Imbolc means what it means in part because time connects it to Alban Arthan. They have to be understood as part of a whole—that ever-turning Wheel.

(As I’ve said, it is a continuing source of bemusement to me that finding a deep connection to a Pagan calendar has led to my rediscovery of the Christian liturgical year. But of course those two are connected as well.)

Earth-centered spiritual traditions are always seeking wisdom in nature. What does the world have to teach us? What lessons can we find in the patterns we see there? The Earth is the Mother who birthed and sustains us; it makes sense that like any parent, she would have lessons for us. Likewise, if one accepts the idea of a creator God who made everything, who poured Themself into everything, one ought to go to nature to understand Them better.

So I’ve been looking to the Wheel of the Year in part to help me change my whole attitude about winter. Because I don’t generally like winter. I have a hard time with shorter days. I don’t handle the cold very well, and I don’t like not being able to be outside comfortably. Basically, up until this year I regarded the coming of the end of autumn with real dread, and while I sensed that that wasn’t a healthy way for me to live, coming to Druidry showed me just how unhealthy it was.

If the Earth has lessons for us, if every part of a God-soaked creation has something to teach us, what can I learn from winter? What can I learn from the time between Samhain and Alban Arthan—indeed, the time between Alban Elfed and Alban Eiler (Ostara), the Vernal Equinox?

And in this season of Advent, which encompasses the anticipation of both Christmas and Alban Arthan, what can I learn about waiting?

Among other things, that there’s a meaningful and important difference between waiting for something you know is coming at a particular point, and waiting for something that you have no idea when it’s coming—or if it’s going to come at all.

(If I keep doing these odd little writings I will return to this specific point at Holy Week.)

A core feature of any calendar is that it’s predictable. I know when Alban Arthan is coming. I know when spring is coming. That period of waiting has a clear and visible endpoint. But what about waiting without any end in sight? I’ve been struggling with that a lot in the past week, which is especially frustrating given that it’s a return to a very old kind of angst I thought maybe I had finally gotten over.

I’ve been freaking out about my writing career.

I’ve been looking around at all my friends and colleagues, and it seems like so many of them have their shit together so much better than I do. They have book deals. They’re getting critical attention. They have neat stuff coming out. They’re making all these exciting announcements and everyone is excited about them. They seem like the Cool Kids. They are exactly where I want to be, where I’ve been waiting to be for years, and it’s easy to look around and feel, along with the ugly gnawings of resentful envy, the despairing sense that I’m waiting for nothing. That it doesn’t matter how hard I work or how good I am at what I do. I’m never going to get there. Or even if I do eventually get there, how long will this go on? How long will I be waiting?

How long do I have to feel this way?

Digression that actually isn’t a digression: I’ve been thinking about the notion of sin, and, given that my Christian Druidry makes no room for the doctrine of Original Sin—and I don’t want it to, I have never found that doctrine appealing or even particularly compelling—what I’m supposed to make of it. And where I’ve arrived is that “sin” is a word for that which separates you from your community and yourself and the world. Anything that harms yourself or others. Anything, in short, that separates you from what I understand as God.

This is why it does make a degree of sense to me to reference the whole Seven Deadly Sins thing and consider envy a sin: it is so, so goddamn isolating. It separates you from the people you’re envious of. It separates you from yourself. It prevents you from living fully. This is not about guilt at all; this kind of sin is not necessarily something to feel guilty for, or at least guilt has highly limited utility. This is damage that you have to find a way to heal.

But anyway, all that meant that I went from feeling frustrated to feeling envious to feeling worthless and alone, all because I was getting very tired of waiting for a future that I desperately want and couldn’t stop worrying about, and the whole thing just spiraled down.

So I asked for help.

I tweeted that I was having a very hard time and if anyone had anything nice to say to me about me or about what I do it would be a great time to do it.

And I was flooded with the kindest people saying the kindest things.

Here’s the point: they didn’t only make me feel less worthless and more connected. They helped me to stop worrying so much. The kindness that was showed me grabbed me by the collar and said Hey, focus on what’s happening right now, with these people who care about you. The future is the future. I have no control over it. What I do have at least some control over is what’s going on inside me right now.

I’m waiting. So be in the waiting, feel the waiting, learn from the waiting, and stop worrying about when the waiting will or won’t end—if it ever does.

Be open. Be still. Let the waiting be the point.

Maybe it’ll stop feeling like waiting and start feeling like something else.

As part of my Advent practice, I’ve been spending time thinking about Jesus himself—who he is and what he means. Because—and this sounds like the most ridiculously obvious thing in the world but honestly I think it’s an easy plot to lose—for a Christian, Christmas is about Jesus. Not just the baby; the whole guy. The whole story. The whole weird, counter-intuitive, uncomfortable, subversive, prickly, radical package.

The meaning of Christmas in context with all the other days.

A close reading of the Gospels reveals something important about Jesus: he was constantly, even urgently concerned with the here and now. What are you doing right now? Where are you going right now? What do you think now, feel now, believe right goddamn now?

I learned an interesting thing recently, which I think most Christians get completely wrong: When Jesus and others around him speak about “eternal life”, they aren’t speaking about the afterlife at all. Whatever comes after death is simply not part of the discussion. It’s not a concern. This is “eternal life” in the sense of life lived in harmony with the eternal. Life lived in accordance with the goodness of God.

In other words: Forget about later. Forget worrying about and waiting for whatever comes after death. How are you living right now? In the midst of the waiting, how are you living in the world?

Is it waiting at all? Or is it something else?

Worrying and waiting are so much a part of each other, especially—like I said above—when it comes to waiting on the deeply uncertain. Jesus specifically talks about how pointless and even silly it is to worry about the future:

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. ... Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.

— Matthew 6: 25-34

Notice something there? Something vaguely Druidy?

Jesus is saying Look at nature. Nature has things to teach you about God and about yourself. The Earth has things to teach you about how to live. And one of the ways you should live is in the here and now. Don’t focus on the future. You’re alive right now.

One of my favorite poets—I’d be comfortable calling her a Bard in the Druid tradition, which is to say someone who‘s tapped into the divine creation force of Awen and is using it to put wisdom into the world—is Mary Oliver. She’s intensely nature-focused in her poetry, and a theme that permeates her poems is paying attention—that to engage fully with the world is to pay attention, and that one should be specifically and particularly attentive to nature. This is nowhere clearer than in her iconic poem “The Summer Day”:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

The final bit is almost chiding. It’s making gentle mockery of the very idea of a plan. How is kneeling down in the grass a plan? Planning something like that is foolishness. You simply do. You simply are. You live in the world.

We’re all supposed to be so “productive”, which is to say busy, which is to say constantly thinking about what’s next and what we have to do with that time so that we can focus on what comes after that. There can be kind of implicit testing in the question “What did you do today?” What work did you do? What did you produce? How did you justify yourself?

Well, I strolled through the fields. All day. What else should I have done? What did you do that’s so much better? What did you do that’s so much more worthwhile? How are you living in the world right now? Are you living in the right now at all?

Should you?

So what does this cold, dark time of waiting have to teach me?

The Wheel of the Year is always turning. In one sense it’s always looking forward, because it’s always moving forward, but in another sense it’s a perfect expression of immediate presence in the whole, every day in meaningful context with every other day, every day unique and worth all the focus you can muster and yet part of a much grander pattern. And the Wheel’s forward movement is a cycle, not a straight line. Sooner or later you always end up back at the same day—even if it’s not the same day.

Right now I wait for Christmas, and I wait for the Solstice. The word solstice comes from the Latin “sol” (sun) and “sistere”, which means to stand still.

In other words, the Solstice is the stillness of the sun.

Advent teaches me to wait. Waiting teaches me to pay attention. One can’t worry about the future and pay attention. So Advent teaches me not to worry but simply to be.

And the Solstice will teach me to be still.