Introducing Commoners’ Advent

Commoners' Advent, day 1

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Within our darkest night,

you kindle a light that never dies away...

~ Taizé chant

It has been a very long time since I have shared anything here, not since October 2023! Before I write more, I want to thank all those who have followed my blog and stayed through that time. There have been all sorts of reasons for not writing, not least the unfolding events in Gaza, which took over all my heart and mind through all last winter and this year too. There was no Christmas in our home last year, or a very subdued one at least.

Since 2019 I have written for each day of, what many people call, Celtic Advent but last year I couldn’t find a word to say. I am not sure that I can find words now but I am determined to try, despite not being sure that I remember how to write at all. It has become clear in the last year that, no matter what the horrors the people of Palestine have endured, and which many of us have dedicated ourselves to witnessing, the powerful will not be coming to help, and indeed are often providing support and aid to the perpetrators. That is not going to change any time soon and so we must find ways to fill ourselves up for the long journey it will require to bring change and the breaking of chains. Like all liberation, that will come from ‘below’, not from those who have power and are determined to keep it. And Advent is all about help that comes from below.

I have always been good at hope. In previous times when horrors have occurred, although not of the magnitude of this one, I have been able to find comforting and hopeful words to say, and many of those words were grounded in our traditional feasts and festivals, both Christian and Pagan, which weave their way through all my days. I have written about imaginal cells which are contained in the liquid remains of a caterpillar-become-chrysalis, finding one another until they can ‘imagine’ a butterfly into being, about the importance of the toxins of injustice being drawn out into the open, about the ‘firefly resistance’; that spark of the good that never goes out. All these things still feel important but I haven’t found a way to write about them in relation to Gaza. All I have been able to do is watch, write letters, join with community, and feel my heart breaking for the people of Palestine, for the olive trees, for Life.

There are perhaps three things which have prompted me to, not only begin writing again, but to fully embrace the celebration of the seasonal feast days once more.

The first has been the community of the Little Church of Love of the World for whom I am ‘hedgevicar’. Communities need tending and nurture and so, no matter how I have been feeling, I have held onto the thread. It has mattered to mark the days, and to mark them together.

The second is one of the enduring images I have from Gaza, probably from about a year ago. It is an image that has stayed with me of a little boy, only a toddler, covered in dust from a bombed out building, shaking from fear, his family dead, being held by a nurse in a makeshift hospital and reaching out gently and hesitantly to touch a bright red toy car, his eyes like saucers. He tapped the car over and over again as though it was the only thing anchoring him to this life. Perhaps it truly was. I hope and pray that he is safe and well. I thank him for reminding me that we all need anchors, and for reminding me that our hearts go on beating no matter what the horrors we are experiencing.

The third has been reading ‘Solidarity is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Anti-Zionist Jewish Organizing’ by Rebecca Vilkomerson and Rabbi Alissa Wise, who write;

“In this work there are all too few moments of unqualified victory or sense of satisfaction. We have to create those for ourselves in order to maintain our ability to keep going…a chance to tap into the rhythms that sustained some of our ancestors, who likewise carved out moments of joy in otherwise gruelling lives. There were so many reasons to be in our joy at that moment. Those moments are the glue that bind us together, recharging our batteries for the ongoing fights and the inevitable push back..Our rage and pain led us to each other and that is its own cause for celebration.

The poet Khalil Gibran captures the kind of joy that we felt...Then a woman said, “Speak to us of joy and sorrow.” And he answered, “your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the self same well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”As Gibran captures, our joy is only known because of the immensity of our sorrow.”

And so it feels that it is time to gather up the immensity of our sorrow, tap once more into the rhythms of our ancestors, and find our joy. Which brings us to Advent and the journey towards Midwinter and the rebirth of the Light.

Image: Jacqueline Durban

We traditionally think of Advent; the preparation period for Christmas, as beginning either on 1st December when we open the first door of our Advent calendar or, if we are churchly minded, on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which this year is on the same date, & which is also the beginning of the church year because everything is born in the dark. But there is an older, and perhaps wilder, Advent which was marked from at least the 5th Century when Saint Perpetuus, then Bishop of Tours, directed his monks to fast three times a week from Martinmas, St Martin’s Feast Day on 11th November, until Christmas Day.

Martinmas is a wonderful festival, marked by lantern-lit processions, and in Eastern Germany, where it is particularly popular, with Martinsingen; St Martin’s songs.

Stuttgarter Nachricten

The festival remembers 4th Century St Martin of Tours, a Roman soldier who laid down his sword to follow the way of peace. He was imprisoned for his principles, becoming an early conscientious objector. In the most famous story about him he tore his cloak in half one bitterly cold night to share it with a poor man. This is particularly significant as a Roman soldier’s cloak, the hooded paenula or unhooded sagum, doubled as the soldier’s bedroll, being both warm and waterproof.

That St Martin shared his cloak with another lessened his own chances of survival in a harsh climate (not charity ~ giving away what he could spare, but justice ~ giving away more than he had to spare because he knew that what we have is always at the expense of another) but the gesture had another meaning. In Rome, the sagum was worn in deliberate contrast to the toga, which was considered to be a garment only of peace time. Even citizens of those cities who were uninvolved in fighting would wear the sagum in times of war to symbolise their support of the army. And so, by tearing his cloak in half St Martin was dismantling the very symbols of war itself. That St Martin’s Feast Day now falls on Remembrance Day here in the British Isles and throughout the colonised Commonwealth seems the most powerful of synchronicities, especially when we are entering a time which we hope will call in Peace on Earth.

But St Martin holds even more threads for us to follow. We are told that, once released from the army, he went to live as a hermit on an island populated by wild hens but lived only on wild roots and herbs, pursuing a life of non-violence towards all beings. He demanded that prisoners’ be set free, in contrast to State violence, and, when he was prevailed upon to become a bishop he was so reluctant that he hid in a gaggle of geese. We are told that the geese gave his whereabouts away with their loud honking, and so a bishop he became.

I have written many times before about the importance of geese as a manifestation of Spirit in the older form of Celtic Christianity, but this story also reminds us that other than human animals have agency and wills of their own. We are not in charge here and are merely a tiny part of a shimmering Web of Life. St Martin, like so many of the pre-Reformation saints is ‘de-centred’ and challenges us to find Spirit in the wilder world around us.

As for Martinmas and geese, in medieval times many celebrated Martinmas with an autumn feast but only the rich could afford to eat goose, with the poor dining on duck or hen. Which is why it is such a truly subversive delight for the Cratchits to have a goose for Christmas Day in Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol'.

They hang the man and flog the woman

That steals the goose from off the common

Yet leave the greater villain loose

That steals the common from the goose.

(Anonymous 17th Century protest poem)

In 1824, Dickens' father was sent to the Marchelsea prison in Southwark for a debt to a baker & Dickens was forced to leave school to work in a factory. No doubt, like many amongst us now, he had many Christmases without good cheer. It is meaningful then that our first saint of Old Advent set the prisoners’ free, offered justice to the starving, and food sovereignty for all.

Each year for Martinmas, we make homemade lanterns in the Little Church of Love of the World. Here’s mine for 2024. I am going to keep a light in it all through these Advent days.

It is becoming more popular to celebrate a longer Advent, although many do not start marking the days at Martinmas but from November 15th (or the 14th eve) as ‘Celtic Advent’, following the tradition of the monks of Gaul. It also seems a perfect synchronicity to me that 15^th November marks the Commemoration of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence and the Day of the Imprisoned Writer.

Before our time was colonised in the name of Capitalism and productivity so many more of our days were given over to the sacred and so it was with Advent and Christmastide, which once continued until Candlemas on 2nd February. There is a beautiful rhythm in this as it means that both Advent and the Christmas season last for forty days, mirroring the forty days of Lent and Eastertide. Indeed, Advent was once known as ‘St Martin’s Lent’. It also means that, once, Christmas and all that goes with it lasted for almost three months! We must reflect of course on the ways in which the institutional Church has also colonised the time of the Common people, but it does feel that there is much to be reclaimed by once more carving out a conscious space for the holy and hallowed to come in more slowly and mindfully.

It seems that, rather than being a fixed time, there are so many ways of starting and ending Advent and Christmas. This is all rather unsettling but gives us space to choose the date which suits us best and to explore what resonates with us most. There is a wildness and a breaking of boundaries in that alone.

It’s not even known with any credibility when the marking of Advent first began; almost as though it grew up from the mycelial threads of the soil or fell from the stars, but it has called us to seek ways to sit in the in-between of the thin places for many hundreds of years, just as the even older earth-based faiths did before it and continue to do. This makes so much sense as at Advent we are sitting in vigil awaiting the incarnation of Divinity on Earth, an incarnation that will come with the birth of the Son and rebirth of the Sun at Midwinter. Christianity at its best is a faith so deeply woven into the mess and muddle, and magnificence, of matter that of course it is rooted in these deeper tides.

And that is one of the reasons why I have chosen to explore a ‘Commoners’ Advent’ this year. Whilst I was reading ‘Solidarity is the Political Form of Love’, I remembered visiting an exhibition on Egyptian religion at the British Museum many years ago. I have an unreliable memory, but what I do remember is the clear distinction made between the religion of the rich and powerful, which was all about assuaging guilt caused through exploitation and trying to buy a gentle journey in the afterlife, and the religion of the common people, which was centered on the land, the provision of food, community, and finding joy in the sorrow.

I believe that the time has come to make that distinction again. No more atonement for sin, no more suffering in this life in the hopes of attaining Heaven after death. Life is to be lived now in a world of abundance and blessing, deeply woven into Creation. That it is so often very far from that is not because we are here to suffer, but because we live under a system of exploitation and oppression, an Imperialism that benefits the few at the expense of the many. It is the system that took the Commons, once shared land and resources, away from the people, and it is the system that is killing the people of Palestine. Power wants land, and we have been taught to look up at a God in the sky, rather than down at the mossy green rooted Christ beneath our feet. This is the Christ written about so movingly by Will Stenberg;

“Before Rome's disastrous intervention and Britain's colonization, there was an Irish Christianity that grew organically in Ireland and had pagan roots. The Christ of this tradition was different from the Christ of Europe. He was a Druidic Christ who rode the winds, who howled with the wolves in the wildwood, who spoke with spirits by secret brooks - and also a Christ of the hearth, the fire, the mug of ale shared between friends. He was a holy trickster, a magician, a storyteller, and God.”

At Advent, taken from the Latin, ‘adventus’, for ‘coming’ or ‘arrival’, we are waiting, and the Christ of the wolves and the wildwood, the hearth, and the mug of ale is the one we are waiting for.

And so, at Advent, we are calling in the holy disruptor who turns the world upside down, born as a displaced refugee, who brought what was at the margins to the centre, gave voice to the voiceless, and spoke out against Empire in all its forms, the Lord of Misrule, who turnbed power on its head and made the peasant king and the king a peasant. We are calling in Peace on earth, in contrast to Pax Romanus (a ‘peace’ only for those who complied with Empire). We are calling in the deer mother and her sledge of reindeer bones, gathering up the sun to turn the world green again and to keep us sane in a world that feels to be unravelling.

I hope to explore all these things as we move slowly, slowly through these dark candlelit days of Advent. And we will journey with the winter saints, from St Martin the Lantern Bearer and his goose to St Hugh and his swan wife, Old Clem the Blacksmith and his forge of transformation, St Barbara, patron saint of miners, helping us go into the dark with purpose to gather the coal that will keep the winter fires burning. And on, if we keep heart, to St Baglan and his wild hill church that welcomed all and excluded none, St Baglan, who can teach us how to carry the embers of our rage for justice without being burnt and without diminishing our fuel. And, perhaps, on even further to goddess-saint Brighid and Candlemas, the blessing of the flame, and our re-emergence into the light. And we will journey to the heart of the rosehip, the belly of the fox, meet the bone horse Mari Lwyd, and the Child of Winter Stars; the one we have been waiting for.

Image: 'Nights of Reindeer & Starlight' by Wood Hill.

But, beyond all of this, we will stay true to hope. Because hope is resistance. Do join me.

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... to hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable." ~ Rebecca Solnit

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Martin's_Day 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_of_Tours 

https://www.romanobritain.org/8-military/mil_soldiers_cloak_.php 

#CommonersAdvent #OldAdvent #CelticAdvent #StMartinsLent #WinterLent

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