The First Sunday of Advent: preparing the way

I made my own Advent wreath this year. 

It’s actually not the first time I’ve done that. I’ve bought a frame and candles and fake evergreens decorated with fake berries and balls dusted with gold glitter (which I’ve then had to place on a high shelf where my weird cat can’t get to it because for some reason her favorite holiday snack is fake pine needles). But this is my first Advent as a Druid, my first liturgical year in this weird marriage between Paganism and the enchanted Christianity of my childhood. 

So the wreath I made this year was different. Smaller, made of living holly and clippings of red cedar from around the house—cut after some time spent asking the trees for permission. Today when I lit the first candle I thanked them for their gifts, as I always thank the gods and spirits in my grove for all their blessings. 

I’ve talked many times before about how strangely and easily Christianity and Druidry come together, at least for me, and Advent is one time of the year when that feels especially true. This time of the liturgical year is defined by anticipation, and the same is true in the Pagan calendar. We look for the coming of two great lights: Christians await the birth of Christ at Christmas, and Pagans await the rebirth of the sun at the Solstice. Of course there’s an actual historical reason why both days fall so close together, but also to me it simply feels right. 

Since my earliest childhood I’ve loved the tradition of the Advent wreath. I’m not entirely sure why; probably it appealed to the already-existing Pagan sensibility of small me. It is, after all, extremely Pagan in sensibility, and not just because of the presence of the evergreens. Perhaps it’s just the ritual of it, the marking of each week until the final all-important one. Rituals that mark time have been one of the most soul-satisfying discoveries for me as I’ve begun walking a Druid path. 

In any case, making a wreath specifically for my altar seemed like the most natural thing ever. 

I blessed it with a suitable Catholic text I found, and read from the book of Isaiah—again, a passage that seemed perfectly matched to the time before Alban Arthan.

The people walking in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness
a light has dawned.

I also used a bit of a prayer from the divinity school at Vanderbilt University, some of which hit upon one of my favorite things about the Christmas story, which also meshes well with Druidry for me: that we can find the divine in the last places we’d expect, if we only bother to look and pay close attention.

We seek the mighty God
in the most unlikely places
as a child in a stable,
and in an empty tomb. 

The lighting of the first candle is the beginning of an emergence from the dark no-time that falls over the Earth after Samhain, when the light hasn‘t yet returned but the horizon is beginning to lighten even as the days grow shorter. We wait for the divine in something as mundane as the dawn, and in a child born into poverty and exile. Both of those things happen every day, but when we bother to look and truly see them, we understand them as miracles. 

In the meantime we wait, and the world waits with us.  

See the gray skies overhead, preparing the way
for the bright sun soon to come.
See the gray skies overhead, preparing the way,
for the world to awake once more.