Advent, Day 1: No Desert, This

No desert, this:
No time of giving up
Nor letting go – 
Nor gathering in
A harvest,
Rich or spare.

Now is time
For the unresolved – 
By wander or by call,
Wait or weight not moved
By best intent.

Now is time
When birds and stones cry out –
Though yet unknown;

In wheeling winds, 
In the unmown place,
Their gifts are building
Growing towards
Lengthening towards
Some flight of season –

Rare.

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My friends –

Once again, the year has washed us ashore – here.

Where?

One of the two great “question mark” spaces built into the liturgical year; those spaces which, if we are wandering them correctly, offer us not a single guarantee of what we are wandering towards.

I greatly prefer Advent when I do not know what I am wandering towards.

There is, you see, a terrible temptation to fixate on cute little manger scenes this time of year. I do not precisely object to the manger scenes per se – I had an early habit of stealing Baby Jesus from pre-natal residence in my mother’s sock drawer – but hear me out: convenient crèches do not pop up anywhere else in life, at any other time, to form a conclusive little “point to all this.”

My mother passed away last December, at the beginning of Advent. A Reverse-Advent, if you will.

I don’t know what she thought about the fact of her passing, because she effectively ceased to speak months prior. I still don’t know what I think about it, either: there is some sort of terrible, constant gratitude, and the strange wonder one has for death. There is, of course, also a steady background drip-drip-dripping of random little deadweight thoughts and memories on any given day.

In the spillage, the crèche becomes akin to the classic perception trick known as Rubin’s vase: a black-and-white image which is in fact two images, depending on your focus. Birth, death: a bloody Mary possibly needing stitches, and definitely needing a more hygienic environment than a goddamn bed of straw. Put the angel on the roof, folks, right up there next to the star: I guarantee Sister Death (as a later St. Francis would name her) was much closer to the crib.

And yet – Sister Death, too, that figure in black and white, becomes vase and face at the same time, helping to birth –

What?

The classic Advent calendar, of course, involves opening doors. Theoretically one does this to get at the secrets hidden behind each door, but the promise of invariably-stale milk chocolate (they never, ever make them with dark chocolate) is a ridiculous effacement of the accidental symbolism here.

A door, figuratively speaking, is the original Rubin’s vase – a space that gives and takes, welcomes and sends off. It is bi-stable. It is unresolved. Its function is to remain unresolved. It is a gift of uncertainty.

Lord, take this certainty. I wish I didn’t know exactly what I was wandering towards, because of course I do in at least one sense. And I wish I knew what to do with the steady drip of things that won’t change; pain, and the costly price of its few antidotes.

Open the door, leave it open. (Leave the milk chocolate too.) Don’t bother looking for a desert beyond; this is no site of personal transformation, no vision quest or pilgrimage.

It is a practice of leaving space for versions of yourself, myself – maybe even Mary, Sister Death, and many others; versions that might look quite different from the faces framed by our daily lives and concerns.

And as we each move forward into this Advent – as, each day, I post a piece here – for now let’s just start with that lack of certainty. No desert, this: enough to say, “What is it?” and wonder (wander) forward, uncertainly, between the lines of black and white on either side.

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