Dear Congregation near and far,

I’m writing to share a few reflections for this Sunday, the last Sunday before Christmas, and the marking of Solstice.
I’d like to weave together a few of my feelings and some poems I’ve come across, along with sharing a few other resources with you that I hope you find interesting, thought provoking, maybe funny, and inspiring.
In lieu of our regular discussion, afterwards, welcome any email reflections you’d like to share (and I can pass them on to the group if you so indicate).

First, if you wish, please put on the kettle and join me for a cup of tea.  Mine has just boiled and I’m about to pour a mug of “Glacier Blend” a local mix from the Comox Valley that the 5th street Tea Shop sells.

I’ll wait while you get your tea ready…..

Great, now that we’re all here..in this mysterious connection across the internet and through time, join me…for questions, thoughts, ponders, guesses…here we go..

Please join me in remembering  that the land on which I drink tea, and the land on which we usually gather, is part of the unceded territory of the Comox and other Coast Salish people whose ancestors lived here through many many winters.

How are you feeling in these about-to-be winter days? Are you like me and very eager for the sun to return, while trying to embrace the coziness of the blustery days? Are you, like some I’ve talked to, secretly grateful for a quieter less crazy Christmas? Or are you, like others, trying to see the bright side of what seems like a dreary, lonely, devoid of social Christmas? Do you feel the gap, the distance, the dark? Does it feel like a waiting time?

I’ve been feeling sad and angry and blue.  And also excited and inspired and busy.  It’s all there, the mixture of life.  One thing I find strange is the current phrase “year like no other” that I’ve heard.  I don’t know about you, but each year so far in my life hasn’t looked like the last one.  We humans seem to continually try and find the sweet spot between exploration and newness, while finding comfort in traditions.
I wonder what traditions you are still enjoying this year?

Among us as a congregation, there are varied traditions.  We’ve come a long way in the past few years in becoming more respectful, honouring and inclusive of every one’s different way of feeling and revealing Spirit.

If you’d like a comical take on “Christians and Pagans” getting along, you might enjoy this song by
Dar Williams “The Christians and the Pagans”

Here are the lyrics:

The Christians and the Pagans
Amber called her uncle, said “We’re up here for the holiday,
Jane and I were having Solstice, now we need a place to stay.”
And her Christ-loving uncle watched his wife hang Mary on a tree,
He watched his son hang candy canes all made with Red Dye No. 3.
He told his niece, “It’s Christmas Eve, I know our life is not your style, ”
She said, “Christmas is like Solstice, and we miss you and its been awhile.”
So the Christians and the Pagans sat together at the table,
Finding faith and common ground the best that they were able,
And just before the meal was served, hands were held and prayers were said,
Sending hope for peace on earth to all their gods and goddesses.
The food was great, the tree plugged in, the meal had gone without a hitch,
Till Timmy turned to Amber and said, “Is it true that you’re a witch?”
His mom jumped up and said, “The pies are burning, ” and she hit the kitchen,
And it was Jane who spoke, she said, “It’s true, your cousin’s not a Christian, ”
“But we love trees, we love the snow, the friends we have, the world we share,
And you find magic from your God, and we find magic everywhere, ”
So the Christians and the Pagans sat together at the table,
Finding faith and common ground the best that they were able,
And where does magic come from? I think magic’s in the learning,
‘Cause now when Christians sit with Pagans only pumpkin pies are burning.
When Amber tried to do the dishes, her aunt said, “Really, no, don’t bother.”
Amber’s uncle saw how Amber looked like Tim and like her father.
He thought about his brother, how they hadn’t spoken in a year,
He thought he’d call him up and say, “It’s Christmas, and your daughter’s here.”
He thought of fathers, sons and brothers, saw his own son tug his sleeve, saying,
“Can I be a Pagan?” Dad said, “We’ll discuss it when they leave.”
So the Christians and the Pagans sat together at the table,
Finding faith and common ground the best that they were able,
Lighting trees in darkness, learning new ways from the old, and
Making sense of history and drawing warmth out of the cold.

Now let me tell you one way I’ve been marking the season:

Growing up my family had the tradition of making an advent wreath and then inviting a friend or two over every week for our own family advent lighting ceremony, complete with Bible reading, candle lighting, and of course Christmas baking.
This year, for the first time in ages I made my own advent wreath.  I chose my favorite beeswax candles and a cedar bark wreath I’d made this summer on a solo hiking trip.

The centre candle is in a matching holder to one I sent my sister who lives in Florida.  I miss her deeply.
As I search for readings to go with my candle lighting,  I notice that I feel drawn to poetry that is about grief.  When I slow down to contemplate, I feel quite a well of unprocessed emotion.  Sometimes the grief is specific, sometimes it roams around my memory searching for a cause.  When I do feel hopeful, it is a tender caution, like all I’ve got to navigate by is collection of beeswax candles, not an entire sunny day.  But I love the way the candles smell, the wax and soot and fire.  I love imagining the bees literally gathering up the nectar of springtime, and solidifying it.  I am very literally being lit by petrified sunlight; do we need a larger miracle?

I recently read some statistics about how many hours one used to have to labour for one hour of candle light.  Even a century ago; light took so much work.  Oil for a lamp was so precious.  What our ancestors would say if they saw all our decorative lights!!!  We have SO MUCH LIGHT! LED’s headlights, flick of a switch.  Perhaps we have become too uncomfortable with the dark? What do we lose if we become unaccustomed to the dark? Do we hide our own crap? Do we fear all that isn’t “light”?
One of the things I love doing in the winter is to go for a dark walk.  I walk down my quiet street with no light, navigating by the leftover glow in the sky.  It is very good for my animal senses to rely on other ways of knowing rather than my eyes.  I’d encourage you to try your own way of embracing the dark.

And as I light my way around the advent circle, and I Iike the way the warmth increases week by week.  I noticed this year that the candles make like a compass circle, the four directions.
My advent wreath also reminds me of the four directions, East, South, West and North.
Of the many traditions who honour the four “corners of the earth” as directions that hold certain energy and power.  The four elements: Air, Fire, Water, Earth, and the centre, Spirit.
Can you feel the mystery of Advent, four, directions, seasons, anticipation, longing, light, returning? Perhaps you’d like to make your own four-pillared circle? A temporary one out of stones on the beach, candles, trees, chocolates…?
As I celebrate Solstice I mark the turning of the seasons; the tangible reality that everything does shift and change.  The longest night is here! What a wonderful time to feel into the darkness; to befriend the dark and also to feel the seeds of summer.  Here in the dark the plants are resting, preparing.  Ideas are swirling, love is growing.  Everything happens in the womb of the winter.  How can you honour this turning?

My advent candles also remind me of my childhood of waiting for the nativity story to play out again in my pageant and song and the anticipation of Christmas morning.
I wish I could go back to before I realised that I’m sensitive to sugar/wheat and dairy! Christmas cookies were better in ignorance!
But I do feel more connected now to the larger sentiment that is Advent.  The anticipation of a coming savior, the returning light.  My own understanding of this season has become increasingly tied to the solar-system phenomena of the seasons, and the very earthy experience (in the Northern Hemisphere) of the daylight changing.
Lighting these candles for me, I feel the thirst for the tropics: mango, passion, sun, surf, sweat.
And then I drink more tea and love the alive feeling of the rain on my face as I bike to work.  It’s all part of the human experience, isn’t it?

I came across a poem recently about Jesus’ birth.  It spoke to me for it’s reminder of the HUMAN experience of the divine incarnate.
(If you listen to podcasts; there is an interview on “Everyday Thin Places” with the author.  It’s Episode #28 titled Re-imagining Advent.  I think you’d enjoy taking a listen:

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/everyday-thin-places/id1512530270?i=1000501591482.

Sometimes I Wonder Poem by Kaitlin Hardy Shetler
Sometimes I wonder if Mary breastfed Jesus. if she cried out when he bit her or if she sobbed when he would not latch.
and sometimes I wonder if this is all too vulgar to ask in a church full of men without milk stains on their shirts or coconut oil on their breasts preaching from pulpits off limits to the Mother of God.
but then i think of feeding Jesus, birthing Jesus, the expulsion of blood and smell of sweat, the salt of a mother’s tears onto the soft head of the Salt of the Earth,
feeling lonely and tired hungry annoyed overwhelmed loving
and i think, if the vulgarity of birth is not honestly preached by men who carry power but not burden,
who carry privilege but not labor,
who carry authority but not submission,
then it should not be preached at all.
because the real scandal of the Birth of God lies in the cracked nipples of a 14 year old and not in the sermons of ministers who say women are too delicate to lead.

I love the raw-ness of this poem, and the tenderness, and the anger. Can you feel it all?

Luke 2:11
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.

What did it feel like to receive that news? What did it feel like to believe Jesus was a Savior? The “city of David” takes us way way back in the story to the longings of the people of Israel…longing for much more than 4 weeks.
Is there a long longing in your family?
What are you longing to be saved from?
For me the longing is palpable and multi-faceted.  Sometimes I feel as if the pain I’m feeling is longer than even my lifetime.  Something that maybe my grandmother carried too…
My own version of advent longing is a deeply personal wrestling with long-standing grief, and the feeling that something is thawing.  I’m not sure I’m prepared to integrate what I uncover.
It’s not an ominous feeling, but it does hold a certain unsettling uncertainty.
I long for the light of grace to synchronize the timing of my vulnerabilities, the needs of those around me, and the unfolding of events to some pace I can enjoy and remain present for.
Perhaps this all sounds hazzy and coded.  It feels a bit like that inside me right now, some sore spots in body and heart, a bit like groping around in the dark.  Could sure use a few candles!

Recently I received an email with the trite line, in quotes of “the saviour of the Co-vid vaccine”.  Can you feel the anticipation? Or dread? Or ambivalence?
Can you feel a hope in the cheesy retails items that as the new year to changes over perhaps 2020 was some mathematical anomaly and 2021 will save us?
Are you holding your breath for the approach to the virus to change? –Please don’t hold your breath….It’s time to breathe deeply!
Are you anticipating the saviour of spring fresh air and ease of outdoor gatherings?
But is “salvation” not within us already somehow? Do we already hold the keys to our own liberation?

I pray that you feel some of the comfort and warmth of friendship, love, light and mystery.
I pray that we become part of our own salvation.  I pray that social gatherings come back soon.
I pray for the return of the light.  I pray for the ongoing incarnation of the divine.

I’d like to close with this blessing from John O-Donohue
For the Interim Time
When near the end of day, life has drained
Out of light, and it is too soon
For the mind of night to have darkened things,

No place looks like itself, loss of outline
Makes everything look strangely in-between,
Unsure of what has been, or what might come.

In this wan light, even trees seem groundless.
In a while it will be night, but nothing
Here seems to believe the relief of darkness.

You are in this time of the interim
Where everything seems withheld.

The path you took to get here has washed out;
The way forward is still concealed from you.

“The old is not old enough to have died away;
The new is still too young to be born.”

You cannot lay claim to anything;
In this place of dusk,
Your eyes are blurred;
And there is no mirror.

Everyone else has lost sight of your heart
And you can see nowhere to put your trust;
You know you have to make your own way through.

As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow confusion to squander
This call which is loosening
Your roots in false ground,
That you might come free
From all you have outgrown.

What is being transfigured here in your mind,
And it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become
For your arrival in the new dawn.

from: “To Bless the Space Between Us” by John O’Donohue

Sending light and love,
Celeste.