Advent is a time to honour both light and dark. Today, in our over illuminated world, few of us have the opportunity to experience the dark. And I am not just talking about the physical reality but also of the psychological reality- our dark, our inner, depth dimension.

Over the last 500 years, Christianity has ignored the dark and opted for the more accessible bright half of ourselves – the light, the white, the angelic – purity, is what mattered rather then the dark brutal gods within.

The neglect of this arena is devastating in its consequences – we have witnessed some in these in recent times –  it has also led to serious disillusionment with the church and I am with Sara Grant when she says: “it is the inability of the Church to deal with the depth dimension of human experience which largely accounts for its loss of credibility today.” The darkness has been systematically ignored. Not only ignored but the church has failed to provide people with the capacity to deal with it. Get on with it – say your prayers don’t mind the dark.

In this scenario it is not surprising that people are turning to other religions and practices which do take this inner world seriously. We have to befriend the dark – take our darkness seriously because it is part of who we are – we are hybrid creatures – creatures of light and dark and we can’t ignore one half of ourselves and live credible lives.

Five hundred years ago, mystics were grappling with this  dark, mystical world – St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross. And today we have Rahner suggesting, rightly I think, that “the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all.” In the early church the liturgy was the “objective point of entry into genuine Christian mysticism.” I don’t need to go to India, or further east, to find the mystical, to encounter the dark or to learn how to manage it.  We have our own rich mystical tradition all we need to do is use it. Advent is a good time to recover this rich tradition.

The Advent season is increasingly counter cultural – it sets out to do things differently.

NEW YEAR

Advent marks the beginning of a new liturgical year. Beginning a new year in early December means we are attempting to straddle two calendars and this presents its own challenge.

The secular calendar with all its demands can become the dominant force and induce a sort of schizoid split as we try to balance the two. I don’t think we should underestimate the challenge of balancing  two very different calendars.

TIME OF WAITING

Advent is a time of waiting – of patience.  Carlo Carretto spent 20 years in the Sahara desert – at the end of his time he was asked if God asked anything of him during his long silence. His answer was clear – “God is asking us to be patient.”

Today is we don’t do patience, we don’t do waiting – we are addicted to speed and doing – we are on the go – this is our default position-  we expect things to happen instantly – press a button and get the results. And if you don’t get an instant reply to an email you wonder what is wrong. Efficiency be praised….

We have almost forgotten how to relax living as we do in a culture where time is a continuum of work and consuming – either producing or being entertained – and where leisure is reduced to being entertained by an industry that claims to  know our wants (Amazon recommends) before we even ask -it  leaves us passive and we become spiritually lazy.

I like the distinction between Eastern and Western forms of laziness. Eastern laziness consists in hanging out all day, in the sun, doing  nothing, drinking cups of tea, listening to music and gossiping. Western laziness is different.  It consists in constantly cramming our lives with compulsive, frenetic activity, leaving no time or space to attend to the important.I like the idea that this is a form of laziness! Where we allow the urgent to constantly harass us, get in the way of the important

This lack of patience is relatively new- throughout most of human history we had not choice but to wait, to be patient – waiting for light, waiting for the harvest, for rain, for news.  I like the story told by a friend of mine, Dominic Milroy, about a fishing trip to Chile. He was driving along when suddenly the car got stuck in a swamp and couldn’t move. He walked to the nearest farm and eventually found an old woman and asked her if there was a tractor available. She laughed and said the nearest tractor was 50 miles away. However she said, there was no problem, because Andress and Paco would be  back soon with the oxen – ‘sometime today or tomorrow.’ Dominic was shocked by the delay and even more shocked by his reaction as he recognised the huge cultural difference between the way she lived in time and the way he did.  ‘Sometime today or tomorrow’, meant for her there was no problem, but for him there was a big problem. The oxen came later that day and as Dominic walked beside them he realised that he was living according to the rhythm that human beings in most cultures live, that is at the speed of the fastest available communication. He was used to living with phones and cars and emails and trains and planes and his default position was speed. The trouble for Dominic and for us is that liturgy, the Advent season and the spiritual life don’t do quick – they have a more natural rhythm – the rhythm of growth – and this requires leisure, even play.

So here again we face the prospect of a schizoid split as we attempt to operate out of two different mindsets or speeds – speed, efficiency, where lingering is anathema and the slow, patient presence of nature and ritual. This is not an easy balancing act, and at the moment  most of us I suggest, are tipped into the speed default mode…