Into the Darkness: Entering Advent

Advent & Apocalypse

a church gutted by fire

I still have some room in my upcoming course, Shakespeare, Magic, and Religion if that interests you (but it’s filling up).

Almost as if following a script, the weather here in Michigan turned from autumnal cloud interspersed with sun during most of November up to Thanksgiving (very late this year) to snowy, icy, windy, and cold at the end of the month in anticipation of Advent. With it came, at least for me, a sense of unease and foreboding. I dreamt of being on a ship during a terrible storm last week and wondering if my family would survive. I still haven’t been able to shake it.

But that’s what Advent is, isn’t it? A sense of impending doom that nevertheless hides within it a glimmer of hope. Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

Yeats clearly sensed the spiritual tension between the Second Coming and Apocalypse. In that, he was in no way unique, as the leitmotif of Advent has for most of the history of Christianity been laden with both hope and anxiety. As Eleanor Parker argues in Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year, there are also resonances with this spiritual scenario anticipated in the Norse myth of fimbulvetr, “the ‘mighty winter’ that will precede the coming of Ragnarök, the doom of the gods.” As she adds, in medieval Anglo-Saxon Christianity, “the association between winter and apocalypse was made explicit through the season of Advent” because not only does Advent recall the birth of Christ, but it looks forward to his return.

Living with a very real threat of World War III looming (courtesy of the sociopaths running NATO and the lame-duck Biden administration), this correlation between Advent and Apocalypse doesn’t seem all that farfetched. Yes, Virginia, we are the baddies.

The growing darkness, both cosmological and existential, at this time of the year in the Northern Hemisphere has been for millennia part of the reason communities gather together in their mead halls (or dining rooms) to laugh in the face of impending doom, as we in the United States did a few days ago in our celebration of Thanksgiving and as some Christians around the world do on Martinmas (November 11), St. Nicholas’s Day (December 6), and the Feast of St. Lucy (December 13)—all which point to Christmas, the great festival of the birth of the light.

I remember my first year as a Waldorf teaching assistant, a period when I was going through a very rough time financially and personally. I arrived at school and was climbing the stairs to the second floor when the second-grade class, in procession as St. Lucy and her train, stopped me right there on the steps to give me a biscuit and cup of coffee, singing all the while. They went on their way—and I burst into tears. Little acts of kindness are manifestations of light in a dark world.

The reason for celebrating all Twelve Days of Christmas (which has fallen out of practice among so many Christians, alas) not only gives the lie to the Kingdom of Darkness but announces in as loud of terms as possible the victory of the Kingdom of Light. This is a victory worth celebrating, as Robert Herrick pronounces in his poem “Ceremonies for Christmas”:

Come, bring with a noise,
       My merrie, merrie boyes,
The Christmas Log to the firing;
       While my good Dame, she
       Bids ye all be free;
And drink to your hearts desiring.

Yet, though feasts may flash during Advent, the threat of darkness, of poverty, of illness, and of war still looms. A song that gives me a strange solace during this time is this one by Dougie MacLean:

The thing with Advent and with the growing darkness is that neither one can be avoided, even for the non-believer. A lack of or loss of faith, one might say, is the ultimate Advent. It is a darkness that cannot be avoided, but a darkness that one must pass through. Thus nihilism, thus atheism, thus spiritual dryness of every sort. Surely some revelation is at hand.

Another song of Advent.