Advent

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought for you are not ready for thought.
So the darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing.
T S Eliot, "East Coker," Four Quartets

Thanksgiving, with all its glorious gluttony, has passed and we have endured Black Friday and “Cyber Monday”, with their extreme deals and orgies of shopping. Most malls had the their decorations up in mid-October. They barely waited until the Halloween-themed goodies were on special before starting up the Christmas music and the red and green staff outfits. I am already caught between the disgust of overwhelming “holiday cheer” and the panic of knowing that I have 7 adults and 3 kids in the family to produce presents for on a limited budget and any number of friends who deserve holiday surprises as well. Most things have to be mailed and I’m already behind. This is not the way I remember the holidays from my childhood. This is not how I want my son to remember them either.

Christmas was always a favorite holiday in our house. And the lead up to the holiday was as important as the holiday itself. The season always started with a party at church on the first Sunday of Advent. We sang the first verse of “O Come Emanuel” and made our yearly Advent wreath (and hoped we would be able to keep the candles upright and not set it on fire). The wreath lived at the center of the dining room table until the Sunday after Christmas, getting drier and more flammable with every passing day. Each Sunday we would light a new candle and sing a new verse of the hymn in church, watching the weeks pass by.

There were visits to Santa, packages arriving by mail, rehearsals for the Christmas pageant , either at school or at church or both. While my grandmother was alive, there was a gingerbread house every year, that arrived a week before Christmas and sat, untouched and admired, until Christmas Day. And there were Advent calendars. Sometimes we had the kinds with pictures, sometimes we had ones with chocolates and one memorable year, we had one that had tiny ornaments inside. They sat on the mantle and we dutifully opened one door each evening before bed, to reveal what was inside. It was magical and important and hopeful.

Today, the holidays inundate us from Halloween until New Year’s. We can’t seem to escape them. There are TV commercials and TV specials and civic decorations. People put inflatable Santas and snowmen on their lawns. I even saw a light-up pig dressed in a Santa outfit at Sears over the weekend. Everything is covered with lights the day after Thanksgiving and stays that way until the day after New Year’s. And I can’t help wondering, with Christmas dominating our every waking moment (even if you don't celebrate it), what happened to Advent?

I’m not Christian anymore, but that doesn’t make Advent any less important. Whether you are Christian or Pagan or Jewish, we are all waiting for the Light to return. We are seeking the miracle of rebirth in the dead of winter, that hope of Peace on Earth. And a season of Advent is the gentle ramping up to joy. It is the slow climb of anticipation and it is missing from our on-demand world. The modern Christmas song that says “We need a little Christmas, right this very minute,” is the anthem of a world that has forgotten to appreciate the power of patience.

My family won’t be decorating any time soon. I was raised with the more British tradition of trimming the tree and decorating the house on Christmas Eve and leaving those decorations in place until Twelfth Night. And for now, that tradition will remain in place. Once we are no longer sharing living space with my mother, we will most likely switch our decoration day to the Solstice, to include both holidays in the celebration. We will wait and let the anticipation build. An advent wreath is out the question with a 3 year old in the house, but this year we will do some kind of advent calendar. Something he can open each night and see the tiny miracle inside. And hopefully it will help him understand that we are all waiting for the greater miracle, right around the corner.

Sitting Shift

Fall on your knees
Open your eyes
And admit Brighid.
Welcome, Welcome to the Holy Woman!

-Threshold Rite performed in Ireland on the feast of St. Brigit

Tonight I pray to my Lady and ask her special blessing on all those who heal: doctors, nurses, midwives, chiropractors, herbalist, therapists, researchers and clergy, among others. May the universe bless all who look after our minds, bodies and spirits.

Happy Thanksgiving

"The year has turned its circle,

The seasons come and go.

The harvest all is gathered in

And chilly north winds blow.

Orchards have shared their treasures,

The fields, their yellow grain,

So open wide the doorway-

Thanksgiving comes again!"

- from the Garden Digest website

I Arise Today: Morning Devotions

I arise today
Through the strength of heaven
Light of sun
Radiance of moon
Splendor of fire
Speed of lightning
Swiftness of wind
Depth of the sea
Stability of earth
Firmness of rock
-verse 1 of “The Deer’s Cry”, lyrics attributed to St. Patrick, arranged by Shaun Davey for his suite “The Pilgrim”*

It’s cold outside, but not freezing. But I’m not a morning person and the idea of dragging myself out of bed and into clothes so I can go outside to pray is just a bit more than I can handle with winter approaching. My husband is up and out the door by 7:15 am for his hour-long commute and I struggle to get myself in gear before my son misses his morning potty call and I end up changing the sheets. Getting him up and dressed is my first job of the day, followed shortly by getting him fed. And given that he is a champion at stalling tactics, these tasks often occupy me until almost 9:30 in the morning. But then he settles down to watch his morning TV on our local PBS station and I have time to myself. So I start my day with prayer.

I didn’t think much about prayer when I first joined the Pagan community 20 years ago. I was very involved in ritual work but couldn’t seem to connect on a more personal level. I had the same problem with Christianity, so it wasn’t surprising. I still have troubles being a solitary; and I’m not sure if it is a difficulty connecting personally or that I simply need group dynamics and group energy to fuel my worship. Anyway, I spent a goodly chunk of time writing group rituals and ignoring that more personal expression. I think I would have stayed in that place, if it hadn’t been for a string of negative events, personal, financial and professional, about 8 years ago. I ended up in a downward spiral and, as part of my struggles to pull myself back up, I began to pray on a regular basis.

I began with evening prayers, since that is a the time when I am most active, both physically and mentally, and eventually added a morning devotion as well. I chose to use the Celtic Devotional: Daily Prayers and Blessings, an ecumenical Celtic-themed devotional by well-known Celtic scholar Caitlin Matthews**. I dearly love this little book and have used it repeatedly over they years. My copy is dog-eared and the binding is broken. It’s set up by Celtic season (Samhain, Imbolc, Beltaine, and Lughnassa) and then by day of the week. Over time, I replaced the more ecumenical meditations with more Pagan and Goddess influenced ones from various other meditation collections*** and for a year that worked well for me.

After our move to California, I stopped my devotions for a number of reasons, mostly a lack of time and private space. For 2 years I struggled to find a balance in our new surroundings and eventually, another string of bad luck, that included a fire in our apartment building, brought me back to my devotions again. By this time, I had begun actively serving the Goddess Brighid and so I added two more pieces to my daily prayers: The Deer’s Cry, that begins this entry, and an adapted version of an old Irish prayer, the Genealogy of Brigit. I used this formula for over a year, until my son was born, when again I fell away from it.

Now, as part of my campaign of positive habits, I’m starting again. But this time I’m taking a different tack. I’ve started simply, with morning devotions; singing The Deer’s Cry and saying the Genealogy, before doing a short reading from A Daily Book of Pagan Prayer by Megan Day. Over the next several months I’m hoping to ramp up my devotional time by adding an evening prayer time and some structure, using The Book of Hours: Prayers to the Goddess by Galen Gillotte****. It is my hope that six months from now, I will have fully integrated a time of prayer into the beginning and ending of my day and that I can share some of that prayer time with my son. I know he won’t understand everything that I do, but I hope that by being exposed to my own signs of devotion, they will become something he seeks when he gets older and is ready to make a choice about his own religious path.

And as I light my candle and sing my praises to the morning sun, I find myself at peace again and ready to face whatever challenges the Universe has to throw at me. I hope that I am achieving balance, not just for myself but for my small corner of the world. By sending out good thoughts and positive energy into the world, I’m making it just a little bit better for all of us. And that makes my early mornings well worth the effort.



*For those interested in hearing this sung, there is a purely audio file here and a video on Youtube here. These are of the unadapted version of the prayer. I have put together a Brighid-centered adaptation which I will be happy to send to anyone who requests it.

**For a Celtic Christian themed devotional, try Celtic Benediction: Morning and Night Prayer by J. Philip Newell.

***I used The Celtic Spirit: Daily Meditations for the Turning Year, also by Caitlin Matthews and Patricia Telesco’s 365 Goddess.

****For those seeking a balanced view, Mr. Gillotte has also published a Book of Hours devoted to the God which can be found here. I hope to integrate a mid-day devotion from this book into my practice as well.

Grace

The silver rain, the shining sun,
The field where scarlet poppies run,
And all the ripples of the wheat
Are in the foods that we do eat.
So when we sit for every meal and
Say our grace, we always feel
That we are eating rain and sun
And fields where scarlet poppies run
-Shaker Grace

One of the family habits on my list was encouraging us to say grace whenever we sit down to eat as a family. Breakfast, in our home, isn’t a family time. Most of us aren’t morning people, so even when we do eat together in the mornings, it is done with as little actual contact as possible. Now that my husband is working outside the home, lunches aren’t really all that family-oriented either. My son eats and then naps, my mother eats and isolates herself with the crossword puzzle. I tend to eat standing up, on my way to my next chore. So lunch isn’t really a time for family togetherness.

But dinner is another story. Like every family, we have nights when we don’t have dinner together or Daddy has to work late or runs into traffic on the hour-long commute he takes between home and the office. But we really do try to eat together, as a family, at least 5 times a week and we are trying to open that family meal with a grace. It is turning into a strong moment of family connection.

My family only used graces at formal meals like Thanksgiving or Easter and ignored them the rest of the time. My husband grew up in a devoutly Christian household, where blessings were an important part of family meals. His maternal grandfather’s family had a traditional grace that they used regularly, and that’s the grace we started using with our son. It is definitely Christian, but it has a family connection and we wanted to acknowledge the Christian part of our son’s heritage.

For the things we like to eat
Thy loving gift of food
We thank Thee, Lord, today
For Thou art kind and good.*

The grace my family used, when we used one, is well known. It is most often referred to as the Johnny Appleseed Grace, and I learned it because it was the grace my elementary school used at meals. In later years, I discovered just how fateful our use of it was. The words most people use are actually the first verse of a much longer hymn used in The New Church (or Swedenborgian Church), of which Johnny Appleseed was a member. It turns out that my maternal grandfather’s family were Swedenborgians and my grandfather remained on all his life, although he did not actively practice. We use that grace, especially when my sister is eating with us, because it connects to my family heritage and my sister really loves to sing it.

The Lord is good to me
And so I thank the Lord
For giving me the things I need
The sun and the rain and the apple seed.
The Lord is good to me.
- The Johnny Appleseed Grace**

But I have also been looking for a grace that will connect more strongly to my current Pagan path. Right now, we are using a modified version of the Reclaiming Harvest Chant most often. But it doesn’t quite fit our style as well as I’d like. I think we will most likely retire it from general use and use it on special occasions or when we eat in community instead of as a family.

Our hands will work for peace and justice
Our hands will work to heal the land
Gather round the harvest table
Let us feast and bless the land
- “Harvest Chant” by Thorn Coyle, Starhawk***

Graces seem to be a place where the Pagan community struggles. I’d read several books and looked at several websites and hadn’t really been inspired. But when I joined my UU congregation, they gave me a little book for my son that had several prayers and graces included in it. These included the Shaker grace that I used to open the entry and the grace I’m planning to try next as a more Pagan alternative.

Earth, who gives to us this food,
Sun, who makes it ripe and good,
Dear Earth, Dear Sun, by you we live.
To you our loving thanks we give
-from Sunday and Every Day: My Little Book of Unitarian Universalism

I’m hoping that this new grace will help balance out the more Christian offerings from the rest of the family. I want my family to be more connected to the food we eat and more aware of those we have to thank for it, whether we choose to thank a Deity, the grower, or the spirits of the plants and animals themselves. Remembering that our food is a gift that is shared with us daily brings us closer to our world and those with whom we share it. Maybe if we are more aware of where our food comes from, we will then become more aware of what we are doing to our planet and to our fellow creatures, and seek alternatives to our current path. Wouldn’t it be great; if, some time in the not-so-distant future, we all--no matter what our religious path--remembered to thank; not just the Divine, but the people who grow our food and the living things that give their lives to provide it?

*I have not been able to find the author or divisor of this grace. I know it comes from my husband’s maternal grandfather’s family, but nothing more. If anyone has a clue where it might have come from, please let me know so I can attribute it properly.

**For a more earth-centered grace, replace “Lord” with “Earth”.

***When we use this grace outside of the harvest season, we replace “harvest” with “dining” and “feast” with “eat”.

Mourning Moon*

"The wild November come at last

Beneath a veil of rain;

The night winds blows its folds aside,

Her face is full of pain.

The latest of her race, she takes

The Autumn's vacant throne:

She has but one short moon to live,

And she must live alone."

- Richard Henry Stoddard, November

Here in 1Y1Dland, the trees are almost done with turning. The oaks, usually the last to go, are half empty and the maples are skeletons with a few golden or scarlet leaves still hanging on. We have already had our first snow, although it didn’t stick. Our heat is on and tea has become my morning staple. More of our days are grey and dusk comes sooner, before 5 o’clock. All the world seems to be in mourning for the end of the growing season and warmth and beauty of summer.

There is a darkness to the daily rituals of life as well. Our food is heavier, with more protein to help keep us warm. Slippers are a must and my wool socks have made a reappearance. I’m knitting woolly sweaters for my son and I’ve started the collection of hats and mittens for the holiday charity tree at church. Our pumpkin has gone to the compost pile and the neighborhood leaf collections start on Monday. We need coats to go for a walk and hats are next on the list.
I don’t do magic at this time of the year. It seems wrong somehow, to petition the Gods at a time when the Earth is settling down to sleep and the Lady is mourning the loss of Her Son. I don’t stop my daily devotions but I do cut back on large-scale ritual activity. I will sing to the Moon tonight, but I won’t seek more reassurance then Her simple light. I am planning a Dream Journey for the New Moon, but for now I will hoard away my energies and let the Full Moon pass in quiet.

There is a holly tree outside our kitchen window and over the years it has grown to obscure most of the view. My mother hates it for that reason but I find myself drawn to it. The window gives me line of sight to the tree’s interior, the bare branches behind the prickly leaves. It’s covered with little red berries right now and I get to see all the visitors to that tree-based grocery. There are squirrels, of course, and sparrows and even the occasional robin. But I wait for the flash of color that signals the arrival of our neighborhood cardinals. The bright red bird loves our out-of-control tree and we will get several visits a day from the local male. Cardinals always give me such hope. As the world becomes darker, the weather becomes more difficult and the days become colder, their red coats remind me that there is beauty in winter and that spring will be here before we know it.

*This name comes from Modern Pagan Tradition. Through the year I will be using moon names from different sources, as no one naming system fits my beliefs perfectly. I chose this name because I felt it fit the feeling of November better than the better known names: Beaver or Snow Moon.

Dark Time

What dark time is coming,
What dark time is here?
- “Dark Time” by October Project (lyric by Julie Flanders)

Samhain has passed and the days grow darker and darker. Now that daylight savings has started ending later in the fall, the shortening of the days has become even more obvious. For most (but certainly not all) modern Pagans, especially those who follow a Celtic path, Samhain is the turning of the sacred year. For those who acknowledge a God, it is often seen as the time time of his death or passing into the underworld. And I fall into both categories.

Like many modern Pagans, I find myself in something of a dilemma. Samhain, with all its traditional death imagery and its importance to my Celtic ancestors as both the turning of the year and the beginning of winter, feels so appropriate as the time to honor the Dying God, the vegetation aspect of male Divinity, whose death with harvest allows all to survive the coming winter. But the Winter Solstice, with its strong images of rebirth and new light seems to be the perfect time for the birth of the God of Light, whose infant or youth form begins the God’s cycle again. And if I am to follow my inclination, to celebrate both holidays as what they are, Death and Rebirth, what do I do with the time in between?

The trouble really goes back to Pre-Christian Britain. The Insular Celtic peoples, whose descendants are the Welsh, Irish, Cornish, Scots and Manx, lived largely by a lunar calendar. Their holidays, which Modern Pagans refer to as the the Cross Quarter days (and call by their Irish Gaelic names), were tied to the lunar cycles. From what we know the Insular Celts divided their year into three season: winter, summer and harvest. Samhain was the turning of the year and the beginning of winter. Beltane (May 1st) was the beginning of summer and Lughnasadh (August 1st) was the beginning of the harvest time. To round out their year, they celebrated Imbolc, a holiday marking the lactation of the ewes, at the beginning of February. These holidays were great cultural celebrations with bonfires, herd blessings, games and great gatherings.

On the other hand, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, as Germanic tribes, were strongly solar-oriented. They placed their holidays on the solstices and equinoxes. Today Modern Pagans celebrate those holidays as Yule (Winter Solstice), Eostre (Spring Equinox), Litha (Summer Solstice) and Mabon (Fall Equinox). On the British Isles, the two cultures ran right up against each other. Accommodations were made but there was still a discrepancy. As Christianity swept through, the Roman church chose to adopt the Germanic holidays, putting Christmas close to the winter solstice and Easter close to the spring equinox, while the Celtic church maintained the old Celtic holidays (Imbolc became Candlemas and Lughnasadh became Lammas). Time passed, the two churches merged and the Catholic/Germanic view came out on top, with the Celtic holidays taken as second place or dying out altogether. And it was that strange amalgamation that, thanks to Gerald Gardener, the Modern Pagan Movement inherited.

There are plenty of Pagans who don’t celebrate all of the holidays. And there are plenty of Reconstructionist groups that don’t celebrate any of them. Beltane has very little hold on a Hellenic Reconstructionist, especially when they have wonderful holidays like the Thesmophoria. But for those of us who rose out of a Wiccan or Eclectic background, the strange little gap between the Celtic and Anglic sides of our heritage is still there.

As an Anglo-Celitc Pagan, this gap looms very large for me. I want to follow the feeling of the seasons and the pull of my ancestors. And the empty stretch of time, almost two months’ worth, that lies between the solemnity of Samhain and open joy of Yule needs to be acknowledged and honored. It has weight and purpose. The earth is slowly falling asleep, becoming fallow. The nights are longer and colder and the frosts are heavier. In northern climes, there is already snow on the ground. It’s as if this time is an expectant inhaling of breath, waiting for the joyous exhaling of the Sun’s rebirth on Solstice Morning.

I think we need this time to turn inward. Winter is the season of introspection, but the Holiday Season, with its bright lights and big parties, interrupts that with its deliberate demand of extroversion. I often find it hard to return to the quiet of the Fallow Time after Yule. So I want to turn this time into a moment of interior growth, of dream journeys and path seeking.

My Witch’s Calendar refers to the Full Moon of November as the Mourning Moon. So that is what I will do. I will follow the path of the mourning Goddess, seeking Her Son in the dark places. My rituals will be solitary and my path, the lonely one. I will turn my face from company and seek the Light in quiet contemplation.

The churches are empty
The priest has gone home
And we are left standing
Together, alone.
- “Dark Time” by October Project (lyric by Julie Flanders)

Sitting Shift

Holy Water, Sacred Flame
Brighid, we invoke Your name.
Bless my hands, my head, my heart,
Source of healing, song and art.
-Anne Hill

Tonight I pray to my Lady and ask for protection and blessing for all mothers everywhere, especially those who are mourning the loss of a child. May their sorrows be lightened and their heart's pain be eased.

Blessed Be!