A Still Small Point of Light ~ Celtic Advent Day 12

Lighting the first Advent candle, Wiki Commons

Today has been Advent Sunday, the first of the four Sundays in our familiar modern Advent. I have had the sweetest of days, which began at the Church of the 2,000 year old Grandmother Yew in a small village not far from here.

St Nicholas ~ Church of the Grandmother Yew

The church is dedicated to St Nicholas, whose feast day is on December 6th, & so we celebrated his generosity with the sharing of shiny chocolate coins.

Gifts from St Nicholas 

And we all wore our festive hats! Naturally I took the opportunity to put my antlers on.

And we sang one of my favourite hymns, 'O Come, O Come, Emmanuel'.

But it matters not to become too festive just yet, even after today's little flurry. Advent is a time of waiting, of allowing longing, even for those of us who have been journeying through the older Celtic Advent for two weeks already. Everything is born in the dark, and Advent starts with a seed and ends with a star, from small beginnings to an 'ending' as vast as the sky, but even then we will still be sitting in the dark. How else will the seed germinate, the star show us the way, how will we nurture the newborn spark if we rush headlong for the light? Which brings us back to the four Sundays of Advent.

One of the lovely traditional activities of Advent is lighting the candles of the Advent wreath, or Advent Crown. The wreath is traditionally made from evergreens and with four candles, often coloured violet and/or rose, or sometimes a fifth white one to act as the 'Christ candle', placed around it. One candle is lit each Sunday of Advent, and the fifth on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. This takes place in both homes & churches, the light increasing amongst us each week until the Sun & the Son are reborn at Midwinter. Until then we trust and we hope, as our ancestors have before us for thousands upon thousands of years.

The concept of the Advent Crown originated with 16th Century German Lutherans, although the wreath that we would recognise came into being in the 1800s. It seems that Johann Hinrich Wichern, a German Protestant pastor who worked with the urban poor, invented the Advent wreath as a way to reassure the children at his mission school that Christmas was indeed coming, and so encouraging not to ask for a progress report every day. This first wreath was made from an old cartwheel, turned on its side and with 20 small red and 4 large white candles around the rim. Each day a red candle would be lit, and each Sunday a white one. This evolved into the smaller wreaths with five candles that we know today.

The candles symbolise the increase of the light in the world but each also has its own individual meaning, which are Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. There are variations on the theme, such as Faith, Prepare, Joy, and Love, or Prophets, Angels, Shepherds, and Magi. I read today, shared by author and preacher Sarah Bessey, of another theme from the ancient order of Carmelite nuns, who are dedicated to lives of contemplative prayer & who focus in Advent on Waiting, Accepting, Journeying, and Birth. This feels like a more gentle, slower movement towards the light, one which embraces the dark and the unknowing.

But, what of the more familiar theme for the first week of Advent, that of Hope? I know that many are losing, or have lost, hope in these times. Daily I hear about something which threatens to dim the stars, tumble me into a darkness without seeds. I sit with that, because even that darkness calls for attention, and then I take a deep breath and fall into hope once more. It came to me some time ago that to hope is one of our most sacred tasks; Love pervades everything, always, but hope is a spark that can be blown out, or allowed to die. I once read of humans being 'the ones who carry ochre', but we are also the ones who kindle hope. Refusing to enter the darkness where hope has gone cold prevents our longing to relight the flame of hope. Instead, we warm ourselves on shallow, surface things; materialism, greed, power. For the want of a still small point of light.

I have more to say about kindling hope, and how to nurture that newborn flame in ourselves and the world around us, but for now I will end with a quote from American writer Rebecca Solnit.

"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."

And so, we kindle the flame on the first candle of our Advent Crown for Hope. The world isn't filled with light, not yet and maybe not anytime soon. But, for another turning of the year, we commit ourselves to the future, and here is a still small point for us to focus on. Let's help one another keep it shining in the dark.


References:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advent_wreath

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

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/prehistoric-use-of-ochre-can-tell-us-about-the-evolution-of-humans

Sarah Bessey ~

https://sarahbessey.com

https://www.instagram.com/p/B5iYffCBaWr/?igshid=3e36r4mnnyln

Rebecca Solnit ~

http://rebeccasolnit.net

Luminous Beings Spin the Sun

Luminous beings spin the sun, photo taken in our garden, September 2017

Today, I am deep in writing about the ‘No Faith in War’ event at ‘Stop the Arms Fair’ which I attended earlier this month, of which more soon, but I wanted to share a dream that I had this morning and which seemed beautiful. We live in a little house that is full of spiders, and recently with the turn to autumn our garden has been full of them too. These are the little orb spiders with a beautiful fleur-de-lys pattern on their backs. I am a little afraid of them I admit but I have had to come to terms with their presence and have been spending some time this week in awe of their web-making and hunting skills. And yes, even finding them beautiful. Yesterday, I was gazing at the image that accompanies this piece, and which was taken in our garden last week. I have spent long moments communing with this little spider as she has chosen to suspend her web right in the middle of our lawn and in front of our front room window. There is just no avoiding her. And so, I was looking closely at this image of her and noticed how translucent she is, how the sun seems to shine right through her legs and light up the little hairs on them; radiant, radiating. I had never thought of spiders as being full of light before.

And then this morning, in that space between waking and sleeping, I dreamed of her. And the dream told me that the orb spiders, and other spinners, in our gardens and hedgerows as the year turns to autumn are catching the last rays of summer sun, weaving them into wild and sparkling threads to hold close to the earth, warming her, and carrying us into the winter surrounded by sweet memories of long days and salt-sweat skin; us and all the beings who are contemplating the dark months ahead. It is a beautiful thought and a gentle blessing to sink into as the cold returns.

As I was reflecting on my dream this morning, I remembered that I used to often dream of spiders and that in those dreams they were again filled with light. I came to associate the dreams with good things happening in my life, although often they frightened me. On one occasion, I was staying with a friend and sleeping in an unfamiliar bedroom. I dreamed of a shining spider but, thinking that I was awake and that it was real, I suddenly sat bolt upright and banged my head on a shelf! But still, my spider dreams continued to promise good fortune. I came to look forward to them.

Although spiders have always been a huge fear for me ~ I once came home very late as a teenager, found a huge spider on the stairs and slept downstairs for fear of stepping over it, only to cause my dad to raise the alarm in the morning when he saw that my bed hadn’t been slept in. I found him unsympathetic in the extreme when he discovered what had really happened ~ my slightly quivering and tentative love affair with them began I think when I first attended the Glastonbury Goddess Conference in 2001. I remember that every night when I went back to my bed & breakfast room that there would be a spider of increasing size on the wall. I climbed Glastonbury Tor and, feeling exhausted, sat down on a bench and began chatting to a stranger who happened to be sitting there too. It was all very lovely, and I was feeling quietly holy in that way that you sometimes do when you are young and foolish, but I felt a tickling on my hand and, looking down, saw a huge harvest spider sitting there. Naturally, I flung my arms in the air and fled for my life! I’m not sure what the stranger, or the harvest spider, made of it..

But when it began to feel truly significant was when, on the last day of the conference, there was a ‘giveaway’ of a small gift from the organisers to the participants. We were invited to put our hand into a bag and draw out one of the cards inside, which were goddess images created by my now-friend and talented artist, Clare Beloved. And, of course, my card was ‘Spider Woman’, who is an important Creation figure in Native American culture, and who symbolises creativity and, for many of us, coming to terms with our fears. I still have the card.

The year before I had stood under Louise Bourgeois' awe-inspiring sculpture, 'Maman' ('Mother'), at the opening of Tate Modern in London. It was a powerful experience of what fierce mothering feels like. I found her sacred, her body a cathedral. Maybe that was what called her in...

'Maman' by Louise Bourgeois at Tate Modern, 2000 (Image: The White Review)

During my third year of priestess training, we were asked to do a daily meditation in which we called the barge to take us through the mists to the Isle of Avalon. We were asked to take note of what the barge looked like and who our barge-keeper might be. To my horror, mine was often a dark 6ft long spider with jewels dotted along her sides! I found it quite challenging to get into the barge as it felt so real. When my feeling began to change though was an occasion when I had been worried for some time about having a headache. I very rarely have a headache at all and this one seemed to have been going on for several weeks. During one of my daily meditations my spider barge-keeper came towards me, put the tips of her two front legs gently against each side of my forehead, and my headache went away, never to return. How could I not love her?

And now, through the dream paths, I feel that the spider people have shared a little more of their magic with me. For some time I have thought of autumn as the season of softening, of the breaking down of barriers, of letting go of the hard edges and rigid shapes that we set ourselves in, and so of forgiveness for past hurts and misunderstandings; a mending of the broken web. And, for me, Grandmother Spider has come to symbolise that work. We have much need of her, and of all her luminous children and the light that they seek to weave into our darkest hours.

Orb spider showing her beautiful markings, taken in our garden, September 2017

As an aside, I will just mention that whilst writing I had a phone call and went into the garden to take it. Afterwards I chatted to my neighbour for a few moments. He told me how much he hated all the spiders that had been coming into his house, that they were all over the garden, and that the biggest one he has ever seen is in his shed, making him frightened to go in. Our spider relations have much to endure, energetically and otherwise, living in such close proximity with the human world. My prayer is that they will be sent some light, just as they send it to us. Aho mitake oyasin, amen, blessed be. Inshallah.

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Since writing this piece my friend, Cathy Hookey, has very kindly allowed me to share her art; 'Spider Grandmother's Map'. She says, "This was for a project on maps where I had to map a mythology. I chose to look at Native American myths that include the spider in various versions of the creation myth. Known as Spider Woman, Spider Goddess or Spider Grandmother, the feminine spider deity is tied to the Earth & created the world with the Sun God. In one myth Spider Grandmother & the Sun God create the world in stages; the sky, then the earth, the plants, beasts & finally humans, with four women & four men. I represented these in separate circles, I sort of hoped to give a feel of categories to show the order they were created, but also of oneness. I also quite like the idea of the Web of Life, where we are all tied to everything in the world by strands of web, & tried to get that across in a sort of subtle way in this with the spokes on the circle. The layout of the piece was inspired by zodiac maps."

'Spider Grandmother's Map' by Cathy Hookey

I am so grateful that she gave me permission to share her beautiful work of heart here, and we have had quite a marvellous discussion about spiders too!