December 21, 2024
This is the season where Christians worldwide commemorate a birth.
But before the birth comes the waiting, the in-between season of Advent, a space for holding contradictions. Christ is coming, Christ has come.
I love the contradictions. They don’t force a choice, don’t foreclose possibility. Is the world desperately broken or is there redemption? Am I hopeful or afraid? Is it dark out, or is there light?
Yes. Both/and, all the way.
But sometimes declining to foreclose a possibility is to foreclose a possibility.
Sometimes for the new to come, the old must first die. Definitively. Road closed, door shut, desire dashed. Before there was baby Jesus, there was Mary dying, as any mother might, to her childless self. “Let it be unto me as you have said,” she replied to the angelic messenger heralding the news she had every reason to see as crazy, inconvenient, painful—a total disruption of the existing plan she’d had for her life. It’s another way of saying “let it not be as I had expected.”
Before the messy, joy exclamation of new birth, the exploding creativity of beginning. Before the hushed, holy liminal space of Advent, the waiting full with potential, for which the actual pregnancy is also a perfect metaphor. All this comes after the cold finality of death.
When you’re looking for the storyline, it’s everywhere, embarrassingly obvious. My tiny urban garden alone holds a stack of object lessons: the clippings I cut from the dead summer growth laid down on the soil creates a cocoon from decay, ushering in new sprouts I’ll find, to my perpetual surprise, next spring. And conversely, the failure to give way to death only impedes future beauty. I’m worried for the health of next year’s peonies, with my procrastination in cutting away the mildewed stalks.
January is coming, the season of new resolve for new endeavors, when you’ll take on new challenges, list your hopes for the future. What if first, we took stock of what was, what we’ve shed, what we should? Perhaps these final few days of an arbitrary mark in time afford a space to acknowledge what has been left behind, or to choose, at last, to let the final frayed cord rip loose. Perhaps before the new one we want to be next year we must honor the old, and let it truly die?
This instinct has taken shape in my own life in two intertwined ways this past month. I left a job of eight years last spring to take my sabbatical. Not just a job. A calling. A community. The first death was turning in resignation, then laptop and key card, but seasons can end in the external world while continuing to beat within us. I’ve wanted to write about the departure, to mark the chapter has having ended, but during the season of sabbatical it wasn’t yet ripe. Finally, after visiting former colleagues at the old office the other week, being there in person again afforded the perspective I needed. I was ready to let this old season die. (The post I finally wrote, almost a pregnancy’s worth of waiting.)
I also spent a magical evening with three friends hosting little funerals for things from the year we wanted to let go to. Near the darkest night of the year, just before the light returns, we gathered in Rock Creek Sanctuary, the first time I’ve used our space for myself. We feasted, we toasted. We talked, long into the night, beholding each others’ tender places, lighting candles that progressively warmed the room. We offered words of recognition, or consolation, in the forms of blessings and poems gleaned from a beloved stack of books, and some in words of our own. We spoke our hopes, and in the final moments, put the candles out. Goodbye.
Death to what is gone. Looking ahead to a future birth, whose form we don’t yet know. Back into the liminal space—the place holding room for all our contradictions. Both/and, all the way.
Reader, I rarely address you head on, but as I write this, I can’t help but wonder if there is an invitation for you, too.
Could there be, perhaps, some dying you might need to do in order to welcome the new ahead? What would it look like to find a trusted person to talk it through with, to behold & honor whatever you need to shed, then find some small tangible act to metaphorically (or literally) blow out the candle, let it fizzle away to ash?
