Advent
I intended to cycle to the sea today but the fierce West wind, that I thought I could battle against, was just too fierce and the hailstorm that started as I set off made me turn round. I had to give up.
As I now look out of my study window the heavy dark clouds are ringed with gold. But it is what Advent is all about really - the darkness with the promise of light. And a woodpecker is tapping at the hazel tree in a flash of green and red.
You don’t have to be a Christian to appreciate Advent. Around fifty thousand years ago, a genetic mutation occurred within our species that made our ancestors into artists and artisans; it also had the effect of making them aware of the future and of the past, generating as it did a transcendental awareness of themselves, of the world around them. The seasons would have some meaning and in the Northern world a diminishing of the light would give rise to some questions and our ancestors would try to fathom some answers.
I think it’s highly likely that they had some rituals to take them into and through the Solstice. To celebrate too early might well have been seen as bad form at the least and probably quite hubristic. As the climate of the Upper Palaeolithic changed and changed again, giving way to the Mesolithic and the Neolithic and all the subsequent ages, the different rituals and theology would still have had the darkening world and the return of the light as its core.
Of course, all the changes in the year, all the seasons are marked, and we can see ritual fossils of a pagan world beyond our mindset in the celebrations of the Church. But now at this dark time, there is something magical and melancholic in the way the sun sets early in a burst of flame, before the world darkens. It seems as if it is a testing time, of reflection and meditation, a mulling over of deeds and misdeeds.
A poem I wrote some years ago when I had just come home after visiting my mother in hospital in a particularly wet and miserable time came about because of this realisation. It was in ‘the run-up to Christmas’ to exemplify a favourite phrase, but for me it was a cold, wet, sloshy time, miserable and despairing, and yet the world seemed to have a stark, dark beauty.
I shall quote just a small part as the whole poem is quite long:
The sky burns; flames drift across the smoky
Clouds as though heaven were alight or
The earth on fire; this is not an infernal light,
Nor the light of an unreachable paradise; the changing of the year,
Its ending and beginning,
The balefire of Advent - the yew tree’s threnody;
The awe and melancholy of this penitential time
In this dark, penitential place.......
And I understand why it feels best not to decorate the house weeks before Christmas but to wait. Advent is not just ‘the run-up to Christmas’ but a special time which makes the twelve days, when they arrive, all the more worthy of the carols, mince pies and mulled wine.
As I now look out of my study window the heavy dark clouds are ringed with gold. But it is what Advent is all about really - the darkness with the promise of light. And a woodpecker is tapping at the hazel tree in a flash of green and red.
You don’t have to be a Christian to appreciate Advent. Around fifty thousand years ago, a genetic mutation occurred within our species that made our ancestors into artists and artisans; it also had the effect of making them aware of the future and of the past, generating as it did a transcendental awareness of themselves, of the world around them. The seasons would have some meaning and in the Northern world a diminishing of the light would give rise to some questions and our ancestors would try to fathom some answers.
I think it’s highly likely that they had some rituals to take them into and through the Solstice. To celebrate too early might well have been seen as bad form at the least and probably quite hubristic. As the climate of the Upper Palaeolithic changed and changed again, giving way to the Mesolithic and the Neolithic and all the subsequent ages, the different rituals and theology would still have had the darkening world and the return of the light as its core.
Of course, all the changes in the year, all the seasons are marked, and we can see ritual fossils of a pagan world beyond our mindset in the celebrations of the Church. But now at this dark time, there is something magical and melancholic in the way the sun sets early in a burst of flame, before the world darkens. It seems as if it is a testing time, of reflection and meditation, a mulling over of deeds and misdeeds.
A poem I wrote some years ago when I had just come home after visiting my mother in hospital in a particularly wet and miserable time came about because of this realisation. It was in ‘the run-up to Christmas’ to exemplify a favourite phrase, but for me it was a cold, wet, sloshy time, miserable and despairing, and yet the world seemed to have a stark, dark beauty.
I shall quote just a small part as the whole poem is quite long:
The sky burns; flames drift across the smoky
Clouds as though heaven were alight or
The earth on fire; this is not an infernal light,
Nor the light of an unreachable paradise; the changing of the year,
Its ending and beginning,
The balefire of Advent - the yew tree’s threnody;
The awe and melancholy of this penitential time
In this dark, penitential place.......
And I understand why it feels best not to decorate the house weeks before Christmas but to wait. Advent is not just ‘the run-up to Christmas’ but a special time which makes the twelve days, when they arrive, all the more worthy of the carols, mince pies and mulled wine.
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