[Here’s a piece for Advent II from six years ago. Some of the links are outdated, but most work. I’m still sensitive to the social justice issues I take on here, more now than ever, I think; and it’s useful to be reminded, now more than ever, that I need the dark time of Advent to think about these things so that I don’t lose the ability to tell right from wrong.]

It was an indifferent Sunday, the second Sunday of Advent. I skipped church. Outside the temperature sat at about 25 degrees where it has been more or less for the past three days. Most of our main streets are clear, but we remain frost bound, much of the city still covered by a thin mixture of sleet and snow. Light snow fell off and on around town; we had a bit through the day. Our dogs hibernated, taking in the warmth of their place. Something about this cold snap has dampened their enthusiasm for playing in the snow, which they often like for short stretches of time. Perhaps it was the sky outside, colored that indifferent white that suggests more weather, though we’re told temperatures will rise above freezing by Tuesday and the sun will return. I’m hearing from friends and family in Texas of thick sheets of ice that have created lots of hardship in the wake of this southern winter storm that has just touched us here in Saint Louis.

Advent is traditionally the season of last things, wherein the Christian orthodox faithful have for centuries been invited to ponder the mysteries of heaven, hell, death, and judgment. That Advent, the real one, contrasts sharply with the unfolding Christmas of conspicuous consumption that now begins right after Halloween and picks up speed during the run-up to Thanksgiving. This is the Christmas the paranoid right imagines to be under siege by the forces of secularism and alien religion; though it’s hard to imagine anything more secular than the Christmas of The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol, the Christmas the Grinch stole. Tiny Tim is a secular icon, belonging more to Advent than to Christmas, and his “God bless us, every one!” is the least sentimental utterance in Dickens’ story. Tiny Tim is the terrible vulnerability in us, what ought to remind us as we go about our blessed lives that the blessedness is not ours. It’s a gift. We delude ourselves when we think we own it or have earned it. We are all of us at bottom unaccommodated, such poor bare forked animals as Lear became when his pitiless daughters drove him crazy. That’s what Advent is about; it has always had a secular dimension.

And I enjoy the secular Christmas as most American do, though I avoid the various shopping excesses some of my friends like. I also enjoy such ecumenical events as I can honestly celebrate. The rare convergence of Thanksgiving with Hanukkah this year gave me the blessed opportunity to witness the lighting of a Menorah at my table on the day and haltingly to attempt to hum along as friends sang a Hebrew song. Often the beginning of Advent has been my occasion to listen to “Wachet Auf” with its wonderful pastiche of typology figured and transfigured in Bach’s resplendent melodies: pointing towards traditional tropes of heaven, mostly, though acknowledging that the sudden breaking of that realm into the ordinary real carries an edge of judgment. The readiness at which the bridesmaids seem to fail is attainable, if at all, only through the prayer and meditation Advent urges, the contemplation of the end of life as disclosed in its many beginnings. But this year, perhaps because of the weather but more likely because of history, I’m in a darker humor. At a time when I am personally blessed beyond any anticipation I ever had about how my life might close (and I’m in no hurry for that to happen), I am more and more distressed that my public life is disfigured almost beyond recognition. I am surrounded by needless want, desolation, dearth, and ideological hardness of heart proclaimed, sometimes by people I love, as a kind of Christian justice. And at this season of all seasons it is particularly distressing to think of the following phenomena I take as signs of the times.

Feeding the hungry: Food banks everywhere have been strained beyond their capacity during the great recession. The refusal by Congress to extend SNAP and unemployment benefits that were part of the stimulus package has exacerbated that strain, increasing the suffering index in this country and putting even more pressure on benevolent institutions. Right wing politicians are fond of extolling the virtues of private philanthropy as the remedy for social ills; but now in city after city ordinances are being passed that prevent private agencies from feeding the homeless. I’m hearing no right-wing protest about these terrible laws. Indeed I take Bill O’Reilly’s now famous rant about the poor to be a summation of the political right’s understanding of the teachings of Jesus.

Health insurance: The Affordable Care Act isn’t what I would have liked to see enacted. My view of the matter is pretty much summarized at the beginning of a recent Nation editorial. However, I think the intention and potential of the act was and will be to improve our present system of private insurance, to increase coverage and ensure greater fairness. This is a moral issue, but the forces arrayed against the success of the act (some of them engaging in outright sabotage) are also believers in the gospel according to O’Reilly, no matter that many of them enjoy the benefits of Medicare or have children who are taking advantage of Medicaid. There is a broad spectrum of belief in the land that if you are sick or hungry or homeless it’s your fault and you don’t deserve help. Even if you have a preexisting condition, it’s your fault and you don’t deserve to have health insurance.

Social justice: Our Country’s traditional reliance on the will of the people is everywhere under attack: in state after state through attempts to enact voter suppression legislation (I’ve written a fair amount about this already), in public policy that has systematically promoted corporate interests and the interests of wealth while denying and suppressing the interests of consumers and workers, and in the nation’s capitol where the public interest as expressed in poll after poll on issues as varied as monetary policy, entitlements, and the environment is regularly flouted. That John Boehner claims to represent the American people is laughable. President Obama’s recent speech about economic inequality was moving, but his policies will do nothing to correct it. Indeed, he failed even to address its worst accomplishments. Small wonder, since his administration has actively fostered the theft of worker pensions in Detroit. We have arrived at a place where Time can write in relation to the labor struggle at Boeing’s Seattle plant:

Given what has gone on in the steel, mining, aluminum, chemical, auto and tire industries among others in the last couple of decades, you would think the IAM would understand that labor costs have to be globally competitive. In the global economy, every job is part of a labor arbitrage. Airframe work is already being farmed out by Boeing to Japan, the Middle East and Asia, where the big customers are.

This is now conventional wisdom, and almost nobody, certainly nobody in the mainstream press seems to understand the moral horror of it. It is the teaching of neoliberal economics, which has destroyed the city of Detroit, is in the process of destroying the state of Wisconsin, and even reaches into the arts, as the spectacle of the destruction of the Minnesota Orchestra by its management will attest. The orchestra’s musicians have been locked out for a year and a half, but the orchestra’s failed CEO continues to draw an exorbitant salary and massive bonuses.

Clean energy: Ameren Missouri, my supplier of electrical power, has recently agreed to a settlement requiring it to pay a total of $92m in solar energy rebates, $42m of which has already been spent. For years Ameren touted its green energy program but now, in a regulatory climate that gives renewed permission to environmental exploitation, has sought to abandon it and would have suspended the rebate program entirely but for intervention by the solar industry and the Office of Public Counsel. The American Legislative Exchange Council is now pushing measures in many states aimed at stifling renewable energy development on a wider scale. But perhaps a more urgent concern for me at the moment is what is happening in my former home of Denton, Texas, which is being turned into a gas field by Eagle Ridge Energy and other drillers who acquired mineral rights on the QT and are presently surprising UNT students and homeowners around the university by drilling next door and slant drilling underneath them. There have been fracking accidents. Citizens who have participated in the public outcry are being placed on terrorist watch lists. And of course it’s all perfectly legal.

I’m remembering now a conversation with a friend who reacted to an exclamation of mine that Anglican Archbishop Peter Akinola was a terrible man. This was at the height of Akinola’s influence in this country on reactionary persons in my church seeking, among other things, to undermine the authority of recently elected Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori. Akinola was a devout man, my friend told me, she being an admirer of the Presiding Bishop as I was and am. He was a man who was wrong, she said. We should pray for him. Even more years ago I wrote some poems at Advent. This one was published by Green River Press, in an anthology entitled New North Carolina Poetry: The Eighties, edited by my friend Stephen E. Smith. I thought then (and still think) of the Salvationists as a particular sort of good people, no matter their challenges in present inclusive times and their loyalty to outmoded and immoral beliefs about LGBT persons. You’ll see what I mean in the poem, perhaps. Thanks, Stephen.

Salvationists Escaping

The crisis is always the same.
What if, after collecting coats and toys
TV sets, gratuitous old shoes, we should slip
broke and walking out of Sherman’s Atlanta
barely ahead of gangrenous caissons and burning?

And suppose the children were not
the same every year with surprised grandmothers
getting canned goods and hand me downs, but refugees
with swollen bellies begging the roadside
and sooty fingers plucking our penniless sleeves.

It has somehow to start elsewhere.
The world I make love to has always
had your skin. Its roots and contours
swim in your sea, telling each other touching
all the things that are told.

Yet there is always that other, sometimes
so much of it we die for a while or a lifetime
(once as a child I caught the same
tiny fish forty-seven times). In Sherman’s fires
we swim, tiny fish in buffalo grass.

Love because you must before the world wakes
to the dead city and everything gone but smoke.
Tug at each other’s coatsleeves. Do not let go—
as though there were someone to forgive the burning
as though there were someone to love us but ourselves.

The year slows. The days get shorter. Advent doesn’t end with the winter solstice but shortly afterwards. One of the reasons the consumerist Christmas doesn’t bother me as much as it bothers some of my friends is that Christmas has plenty of Pagan background. When the puritans of Boston forbade the celebration of Christmas, they condemned it as an occasion for licentious behavior and as a papist practice, but they also condemned its origin in the Pagan Yule and other celebrations at the solstice. Christmas remains a joyous time for me, a time to play trumpets and ring bells, to remember how the sons of morning filled the sky with their songs and the stirring of their great wings at the coming of the son of man. I love particularly the fact that Christmas seems to make us all a bit more generous, at least for a short time, and the pagan in me revels in the sounds and smells and dreams of the twelve days. This year the Musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra may be well on their way towards renewing the life of their ensemble, forming their own nonprofit and raising money, continuing to play concerts on their own, now nominated for a Grammy award.

But I love Advent too because I need the dark time, not that I need the phenomena I have deplored in the preceding paragraphs—but such things are always present. Maybe we carry a bigger load of them this year than in other years; but suffering and death and injustice and hypocrisy and crime are always present. I need the dark time to brood upon them so that I don’t forget, so I don’t lose the ability to tell right from wrong and I’m never seduced by the thought that folk who do not share my good fortune somehow deserve their lack: so that I never fail to honor Tiny Tim and Crazy Lear, refugees from the once and future burnt Atlanta, a place we all know, the place some of us know we come from.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)

I first encountered Cummings’s little love poem in John Duke’s familiar musical setting, but I thought of it today because, love poem or not, it describes something important that must be a precondition of the way I feel in the wake of learning of the deaths of two dear friends this past week.

As I’ve said many times in these pages at this time of year, Advent is the season when orthodox Christians reflect upon the last things, those things being traditionally understood to comprise heaven, hell, death, and judgement. I’m struck this year to recall a dear friend’s chance remark to me years ago that the death of a loved one “leaves a hole in your heart.”

These deaths have left holes in my heart. I’ll not say their names, and my task is not so much to sweep up my heart and put love away, as Emily Dickinson put it, but to praise them, and to learn to celebrate my good fortune in having had such friends to carry in my heart all these years. The holes in my heart left by their passing will eventually heal. The scars remaining will take their place among the many scars of the spirit I carry with me now.

Do their deaths diminish me? John Donne would have it so, no man being an island; but I dislike taking solace from abstraction. Rather I would remember their bearing, how their bodies filled the space they occupied, as I still strive to fill the space allotted to me with all the vigor I can muster.

Whoever comes to shroud me, do not harm
Nor question much
That subtle wreath of hair, which crowns my arm; . . .

May these and the like reflections and memories remind me from time to time of my golden friends, how fine, how splendid they were when they were in the world, how their presence lit up the darkness.

It’s All Saints’ Day. I am sprung from four weeks of outpatient rehab, with a new lease on life and a new consciousness of mortality. Yesterday I talked with my occupational therapist, with whom I grew close over the four weeks, about the fact that a condition of my life now is that I can have a stroke at any time. I allowed as how I wasn’t done thinking about that fact but that I figured I shouldn’t forget it.

On the other hand, I am acutely aware of how fortunate I am, and that awareness has been significantly reinforced by my recent association with other stroke survivors who have been left with impairments far worse than mine. My left arm and leg have returned to normal strength, but my sense of balance remains impaired. Perhaps that condition will right itself over the next months as I continue to recover, perhaps not. Perhaps I will have another stroke, or strokes. I have now had three.

Today I can walk without assistance, and I feel almost normal as I do so until something occurs that challenges my balance. I have now become accustomed to recovering my balance when challenged, but I continue to lack confidence in my left leg’s ability to support my body’s entire weight. I have been given exercises to do at home that should help me regain confidence in my left leg. I remain hopeful.

Tomorrow is the Day of All Souls for orthodox Christians, which doesn’t exactly coincide with the Day of the Dead as it is now celebrated in Mexico and Central America. Google tells me that the Day of the Dead began last evening as we were celebrating All Hallows Eve, or Halloween, and will continue until tomorrow, November 2nd. When I think that today is a good day, I am reminded that we remember our own dead on All Saints’ Day and that the day’s memento mori hangs over us until week’s end this year.

And I realize I could have had a stroke at any time, no matter what. There’s a poem in my book called “Take the Hard Road Home” that imagines dying from a quick stroke but also drooling for ten years in a nursing home. Regardless of what my religion tells me, I know that life is a crap shoot. We’re guaranteed absolutely nothing. As one of my fellow patients said one day as he reflected upon his condition, quoting a Jewish proverb, “Man plans and God Laughs.” Somehow, I take heart from that piece of gallows humor and the resilience quoting it betokened in my fellow rehab sufferer.

And I am reminded that this time of year has been my favorite time for many years now. As the old year starts to die we experience a time of ripening that carries with it a presage of renewal. And that is a joyous thing for me today as it has been in the past of pasts. Here’s a memory from my time in North Carolina. I associate it in my mind’s imaginary with All Souls’ Day, Allerseelen in German: the title of a song I used to sing. It is dated November 4, 2013, six years ago.

***

That time when the year starts to sink from late autumn into winter and we recall the names and ways and times of absent friends and loved ones. We recall the feel of them, too, and the feel of the world with them in it, as figured in my memory by the song of the French horn in the last of Richard Straus’s Last Songs. A time of last things in that sense, before Advent arrives with its heavy script.

I was on my way home from a two-day meeting at the Quail Roost Conference Center about this time of year, I think, in 1975. My way took me through Chapel Hill, which then still had a little of the village about it. On impulse I decided to stop at The Intimate Bookshop on Franklin Street. By then I had better than ten years’ experience of the place, known by those of us who loved it as “The Intimate.” I went there whenever I could, sometimes looking for something specific, sometimes to browse, sometimes just to soak up the atmosphere.

It was about five o’clock when I walked in. The day outside just gone to twilight, warming to a muted sunset that sat folded like a well-worn rug on the horizon. As I entered, the chill outside gave way to a wonderfully shabby interior of wooden floors and jerry-built bookshelves, stairs that creaked as someone walked up to the mezzanine. Like many another college-town bookshop, The Intimate did a big textbook business, supplying UNC and Duke students, but also dealt in trade books. I looked about me to see what was new since I had last been in.

On a table in front of me was a stack of newsprint catalogs form Marboro’s in New York, a scattering of remaindered art books, and a few copies of T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, the edition with the pink cover. I picked up the top copy because I didn’t own it and thought I’d buy it to add to my small but growing collection of non graduate school books. As I opened it my eye fell upon “A Song for Simeon,” a poem I didn’t know well then, my education to that point having focused my attention on Eliot’s earlier work, particularly “The Wasteland.” I read the opening lines:

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.

In autumn 1975 I was barely thirty-eight. That Eliot poem in that setting gave me an intimation of mortality that was new. But the surprising thing was that no chill emanated from it. The moment was in feeling altogether welcome and welcoming. I had been given a brief but direct experience of passing divinity, of standing where there is no place that doesn’t see you, as Rilke put it, in which life and death fall away and there is only the real thing left, just now, just for now. My heart burned within me as surely as John Wesley’s had at Aldersgate.

But my experience carried with it no conviction of salvation. Such a thing was as remote from my mind as yesterday’s news. I have experienced other hierophanies. Each has left its print. As I drove home in the early darkness of that long ago November day with my newly acquired Collected Poems wrapped tight in a paper sack on the seat beside me, I carried with me a new and as yet wordless apprehension of the fragility and wonder of the world

—and it was well.