In the bleak midwinter
Impressions of Advent
Whenever I think of Advent I think of that first winter I spent in Scotland. I’ve never gotten used to the long hours of darkness here in winter, where the sun begins setting at around 2:30 p.m. and doesn’t fully rise again until around 9 a.m. That first year the darkness feels particularly oppressive; I arrive at the library or at my classes or at the university chaplaincy as the sun is just beginning to rise and when I walk home it’s completely dark. I’ve moved to Edinburgh for my Master’s degree after four years at a Christian liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, where the pious atmosphere of that campus, steeped in Anabaptist teaching, had begun to feel stifling. Now, though, removed from that context and from the evangelical zeal of my hometown in South Carolina, I’m an exposed nerve. I’ve emerged from a failed relationship with a woman who’d been one of my closest friends in college, the messiness of which wasn’t entirely down to my closetedness; a period of seriously working through religious trauma on her part clashed with my own moment of newfound fervour, and to say I handled things badly would be an understatement. Still feeling defensive in a new culture and in a non-religious academic setting for the first time, I flail about for ways to bulwark my sense of faithful Christian belief and observance that I don’t hate: I catch myself feeling awkward and wary around my nonreligious coursemates even though I know this is stupid and unfair of me; I listen to Taizé hymns and Orthodox chanting in my dorm room; I join a liberal Christian student organization and start attending an Episcopal church. Desperate for some sign that my faith in God is real and not some projection borne out of moral cowardice, I pray mostly in silence, listening for something not of myself that I can commune with.
On the first Sunday of Advent I take a train from Edinburgh to Glasgow for a night of worship and reflective workshops with the Iona Community. The poet leading the workshop tells us about a depiction of the Resurrection in Leicester Cathedral in which the risen Christ is shown emerging from the tomb with a large, erect penis. The artist intended to draw the viewer’s attention to the uncomfortable, joyous, fleshy reality of the incarnation but, in an ironic twist, the painting is kept hidden from view most days of the year. The poet asks us to pay close attention to moments of touch within the Gospels, not just the moments when Jesus reaches out to touch others but most especially when people reach out to touch him, who shouldn’t, and are healed, because they insist upon it – sex workers and people whose chronic illnesses and diseases of the blood mark them as unclean. The poet reminds us that it’s the first of December: World AIDS Day. He is wearing flamboyant red shoes, and this feels important to me for some reason, because I also wore red shoes in my community theatre’s production of Godspell back in South Carolina and ever since they’ve come to evoke a kind of religious zeal or fervour, and also an experience of facing and touching and communing with the incarnation, even if only simulated on a stage. A woman at the workshop says that when she was a girl she had an illness that rendered her blind and deaf and although she can hear now she still prays in silence and feels God dancing on her hands.
The theme for the worship service is ‘Christmas in Reverse’; we begin the liturgy with ‘Cloth for the Cradle’, an Iona hymn, and end with ‘O Come, O Come Emmanuel’. We leave in silence and emerge onto Bath Street while the traffic screams past as if mourning in exile, begging to be ransomed by the Saviour to come. I’ve bought a copy of the poet’s book and devour it on the train back to Edinburgh, ravenous for theological consolation; what I get instead is short, laconic verse heavy with darkness and exile and political rage and frank declarations of queerness. It repels and terrifies me for reasons I can’t explain but it also eases something deep within me, and I’m trying not to cry on the train.
* * *
My best friend from my term at Oxford, a devout Orthodox Christian, comes out to me on a Skype call. A year and a half before, he played an important role in shaping my understanding of my faith at a critical and fragile moment, and met my wrestling and questioning with patience and quiet wisdom – but that’s a story for another time. The internet in my dorm is spotty so that Skype doesn’t transmit audio from my end, but I can still hear him, so I have to respond with typed messages as my friend relates a story of heartache that’s part of the reason he’s back in the UK. When he tells me his romantic predicament is with another man, I type something like, ‘I hope you can both find a way forward that makes you happy’, and maybe also bring God into it. Speaking out loud, he replies, ‘That’s all you have to say about it?’ I type, ‘That’s all. : )’ We make plans for him to come up to Edinburgh after his visit to Oxford, and exchange light banter about growing beards and admiring other men with beards, and this last part of the conversation makes me feel like I’ve said too much and revealed something I shouldn’t have, although I can’t place why.
When my friend arrives, he emerges from the bus station carrying an enormous rucksack full of wine from Budapest, where he’s currently living – looking, by his own description, like some unholy cross between Bacchus and Father Christmas. I’m caught off guard by just how elated I am to see him, and we share a tearful hug. We go back to the university flats where I’m living – me, him, and our mutual friend who just happens to live in my building – and begin catching up. He insists on cooking for us so we brave the December crowds at the local Lidl for ingredients to make his grandmother’s enchilada recipe, and crêpes, and mulled wine. The conversation with the ex in Oxford hasn’t gone the way he’d hoped. I tell him that sometimes I don’t even want my beliefs but I hold to them and try to follow because the Christian story seems to keep happening to me anyway, and this is a difficult thing for other people to understand. He nods and says, ‘Yes. It’s not a matter of choosing to believe.’ We nurse our respective heartbreaks and hangups like this, with food and good wine and conversation. There’s laughter too – the three of us all have a weakness for stupid humour, like live local news bloopers or ridiculous Yahoo! Answers queries – and I laugh more during that week than I have for the previous four months. In the shitty, mice-infested university accommodation, these things become sacramental: divinity revealed in food and companionship and dumb jokes.
We climb up Arthur’s Seat, a mountain of rock that rears up next to a series of slanting, glacial crags around which Edinburgh’s streets and buildings congregate. I enjoy there being such a strange and wild geological feature in the midst of the city; it’s somewhere I can wander and be with my thoughts. Often over the last few months, I’ve gone there in search of some flash of spiritual insight, some encounter with the numinous in the midst of the mundane that would awaken what C. S. Lewis called sehnsucht: a pang of inconsolable longing that carries a reminder of a heavenly home. Or maybe it would be something like what a character in a Terrence Malick film would experience, where some subtle shift in the light leaves them transformed, able to reconcile with themselves or with God or with others – Jessica Chastain or Olga Kurylenko twirling in a field at sunset.
My friend is talking about how we can feel different kinds of desire for people – ‘Like, platonic desire, the kind of simultaneous longing and pleasure you can feel in the company of friends, I think that’s really underrated,’ he says. ‘It’s like you can feel everything yearning to be reunited and healed even if it isn’t yet, even if it won’t be on its own.’
I nod. ‘I felt that when we met you at the bus stop,’ I admit.
We reach the summit of Arthur’s Seat and sit there in silence for a while. From that high up we can see a curtain of rain moving across the landscape directly towards us. It hits us with a bracing iciness that soaks us immediately and makes us shiver. (Some message from the heavens, at least.) We spend about an hour carefully picking our way down.
When we get back to student accommodation we change into dry clothes and put a movie on using my laptop. My friend and our mutual friend snuggle up together on the sofa and I hesitate to join this display of platonic affection between two out gay men, even though I want it more than anything. Male companionship is something I desire desperately, but still shrink from in practice even as I’m content in the presence of my friends, and perhaps this is something in my own life that awaits healing in the already-not-yet-ness of Advent. The next day I see my friend off at the airport where he promises not to cry but is already starting to.
To me the Advent season is made for these fragile moments of uncertainty, of desire, of longing and waiting, of gentle words exchanged between friends, of marking the spaces in our lives and in the world that need mending and acknowledging when we cannot mend them … yet. We wait for a change whose form we don’t yet know, a certain slant of light or some rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born; revolution or reunion; something we are waiting to be that we can’t yet allow ourselves to be or versions of ourselves we must let go – maybe all of these at once. The world groans with yearning for something even heaven cannot hold, nor earth sustain. O come, O come, Emmanuel.