AVECARNE

 

Advent, when I was young, was a penitential time, a sort of milder Lent. You gave up something and were encouraged to search your soul. The darkness of the season was also, perhaps, the darkness of your sinful self; and the awaited light of Christmas announced itself with a very cautious and meagre growth of candles. Christmas, that hybrid feast of salvation’s birth, light’s return and Saturnalia, would be the explosive reward after four to five weeks of deepening gloom. 

            There are things in today’s Church I do not like: the decline of solemnity and reverence; the frequent implication that the tired, the sad and the melancholy in the pews are bourgeois rentiers who need to be shaken out of what peace and comfort they have found; the relentless pursuit of the Second Commandment, in its NGO simplification, over the First. But among the good tendencies I cherish is the new interpretation of Advent. We are now encouraged to see it as a time of waiting: waiting for, and waiting upon. Waiting for the Coming that has always already come and is always still to come; waiting upon the holy, the silent, the infinitely vulnerable love of the infinite who waits upon us. 

            Lent is introduced by Carne-vale: a farewell to meat; but also a farewell to the flesh, to sarx in one Biblical sense: to the insistence of the bodily, the daily, the worldly. And in that, our farewell of course anticipates and echoes His farewell: His farewell to the flesh that He had taken on to be part of what He loved and wanted to save: our precious but lurching human race. The Passion and Resurrection are his carne-vale, a gradual one completed in the Ascension. 

            Seeing this helps me to understand Advent better. Not a carne-vale; but the gradual anticipation of an ave-carne – an in-carn-ation. A taking-on of the too, too sullied human flesh; the flesh that, whatever the spirit’s willingness, is always so movingly weak. The flesh that gives us pleasure, that accords us sometimes a foretaste of ecstatic joys; but that lets us down, that attacks, that suffers, that dies. In R.S. Thomas’s “The Coming”, the Son, peering down at the thin yearning arms on a small polluted globe, says, “Le me go there.” And in going, to us he comes. He takes on that carne, he in-carnates. 

            And we? By Isaiah and other seers, we have been given notice that this coming is coming. That is it is true and will be real. Knowing that, we wait. Waiting is different from the daily round: it is the daily round pointed toward something. But for what? We have been told that at “the end” there will be a Parousia, a final Second Coming; and as a whole and in the long run, we wait for that. Vigilantly, because we have been told that it, that He, will come silently and suddenly, like a thief in the night or like a most peculiar bridegroom. 

            But for now, in this Advent, what we immediately wait for is the ceremonial mini-Coming that annually renews the Great Promise. Soon, we shall re-enact the Nativity, but at the same time we shall light candles, celebrate Santa Lucia, eat massive meals in a season of no natural food, defy the darkness, sing of Yule, imitate a silly fake-Santa-Niclaus by giving each other things; in fact, we shall celebrate not only light but the Flesh: the Flesh that He honoured, and will honour again, by taking it on, by settling into it; by an Ave-Carne.

Image: Edward Weston (1886-1958) "Neil [his young son] Nude" (1925)

CHRISTMAS

As I do every Christmas, I here post the exquisite little poem by English actress Jill Furse, the wife of glass engraver and poet Laurence Whistler and the mother of Robin Ravilious. It moves me as much today as it did fifty years ago.

Jill Furse, by Angus McBean

CAROL

Beyond this room

Daylight is brief.

Frost with no harm

Burns in white flame

The green holly leaf.

Cold on the wind’s arm

Is ermine of snow.

Child with the sad name,

Your time is come

Quiet as moss.

You journey now

For our belief

Between the rich womb

And the poor cross.

GETTING THERE?

    This year, the Fourth Sunday in Advent is also the first day of shortening nights. It’s as if the fourth candle had an infinitesimal but enormous effect: infinitesimal in time (a few minutes), enormous in space (all over the hemisphere). We are approaching Christmas. Are we getting there? Depends where There is, of course. Getting to the end of shopping; getting to the end of decorating; getting (for a few) to the end of fasting and penitence; getting closer to the Nativity; getting closer to New Year’s Eve; getting closer to 2014; getting closer to Epiphany. But is there a There there? What is the fourth candle’s effect on us? 

    There are moments – insomniacs, monks and those on guard duty know them – when dawn has not quite begun, when there is no real light in the East, but when the night no longer smells like night, when there is a strange sense of impending alteration. It is perhaps that sense that our four candles convey. We still need them, to see by, to warm our hands at, to help keep our faith alive and watchful until the Dawn; but the night no longer smells like night, and here and there there is a rustling as of a homeward badger or a waking bird. And so we nod our heads wisely, like the old campaigners we are (or imagine we might be), and murmur, “Getting there”.

And for those for whom Advent, consciously or not, has been a battle on a storm-tossed sea, and who are looking forward to Christmas, or what follows it, or the meaning of it, as a long-desired safe harbour, I’ll add a hymn I wrote last year, to the tune of “Melcombe” (hear it here):

Receive us, Lord, just as we are:

Our wandering feet have led us far

In deserts of the daily round –

Lonely and lost, we would be found.

The songs we sang our lips have lost:

We stand surrounded by a host

Of ghostly troops whose panoplies

Are powdered ash and prancing lies.

Our traitor hearts, each trudging day,

Thoughtlessly throw thy gifts away:

The gifts that meant us only good,

Humble and priceless: paid in blood.

We cannot fight our way to thee

With arms undone by treachery;

Helpless, our torn and ragged soul

Only by thee can be made whole.

Thy love is all we have to trust,

Thy heart more merciful than just

We cling to: we have wandered far –

Receive and free us as we are.