Several days ago, I found a box taped up when we moved here seven years ago and never opened since. Amongst the knickknacks, costume jewelry, and small-appliance instructions I found there was this photo. Two friends hamming it up in over-the-top seasonal regalia sweaters before ugly Christmas sweaters became de rigueur. They had just come back from caroling–the one day their conservative Episcopal parish bent the Advent rule of contemplative preparation. They were waiting for cookies and mulled cider and more pre-Christmas jollity when I snapped this photo, preserved this moment in time. I expect you can see from the glow on both their faces their joy in the season, their love of life, the merriment they could barely keep in check.
What you can’t see is that beneath their Santa Claus hats, both of these smiling women were bald. This picture was taken during Advent 2004, when my friends Belinda and Lynn were both undergoing chemotherapy for particularly virulent malignancies (ovarian and metastatic breast cancer). But they still had the time and the energy–and the will–to sing “Joy to the World” and “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” to their homebound fellow parishioners. Continue reading
Two long years ago, I wrote beneath my name inside the front cover of a newly acquired book the date when I started reading it, “Winter 2009.” Sometime later I scribbled below the date a more revealing message: “The whole year was winter.” In January, I had watched and heard and smelled my husband die. In December, the mentor—’Enry ‘Iggins or Svengali?—who taught me how to think and how to write had died, and I didn’t even know for weeks that he was gone and would never again parse my sentences and pronounce them good. Between those calculable losses had occurred others, more real because their finality was of the soul rather than of the mere body. Emily, who called me her touchstone and then threw me over for a man she met at eHarmony.com. Victoria, who finally became her mother and chose manipulation and madness, with rants and threats and pills.
Just after matins one day in the early history of the church, a young postulant for holy orders sought out his spiritual mentor. “When, Father, will God be ready to fill me?” Father John took a length of strong rope and silently beckoned for the young monk to accompany him. They made their way to the well of an abandoned waystation in the desert surrounding the monastery. Arriving at the parched and desolate location, the abbot tied the boy’s feet with the rope holding the bucket and lowered him into the well until he hung with his fingers mere inches above the water. The holy man returned to the monastery, leaving him suspended there as the desert sun traced its unrelenting arc across the sky. 
I have told the story of my first Advent experience so many times that it has gained mythic proportions—in my own mind at least. The dates have been changed (but only slightly!), and other events from that first crucial year of my conversion have been moved into the four weeks before Christmas—because that way the story works better, it has unity, it is true in a sense that supersedes the merely factual. 
Emily Dickinson tells us that “hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.” Let’s forget all about the image in our minds of a frail and not-too-attractive woman with her hair pulled primly to the nape of her neck, who wrote poems on the flaps of envelopes and pined after Thomas Wentworth Higginson and whose life can be summed up in three sad phrases: born in Amherst, lived in Amherst, died in Amherst. In fact, let’s forget about Emily Dickinson altogether. The images she created on those scraps of paper had to wait almost four decades to come alive after that prim and enigmatic woman died in Amherst in 1886.
I will admit from the start that I am a relative newcomer to Advent calendars. The church in which I was weaned did not observe the liturgical seasons. I had to wait until I was over 40 to learn that the joy of Christmas morning is minimized if we haven’t prepared ourselves spiritually with a quiet and expectant Advent observance; that we cannot appreciate nor even understand the miracle of Easter if we have not purified ourselves to accept Jesus’ sacrifice through our observance of a holy Lent. But I digress.
I am aware that when Freud pronounced his now-vilified dictum of biological determinism, “anatomy is destiny,” he was referring specifically to sexuality, which is not my subject here–at least not my only subject. However, because I like to be well informed even about my offhand references, I attempted to learn a little more about the Freudian pronouncement than I knew from Psychology 101. So thorough has been the vilification of this idea that my Google search for “Freud AND anatomy is destiny” yielded almost nothing except crowdsourced interpretation, misrepresentation–and a Wikipedia entry about an album by a death metal band. I did find one excellent article that provides both historical context and serious analysis:
Twenty years ago today, so the legend goes, the hopeless step-grandmother of a wild child saw a red sign on a gray door: “Enter Here in Peace.” Though the parlous state of her soul belied the mode of entry, she took the child by the hand, and they walked through the door. There, they found the peace she sought–and love and joy and hope. These are the promises of Advent.