Advent: here as on a darkling plain

I visited the medieval church here in Galway for the Anglican advent processional service. Candlight, stone, robes, incense, a choir...deeply moving. These high-church rites do have some power. It was the first time since leaving the Catholic church that I'd allowed myself to really enter into the spirit of the ritual. It meant a lot. I have decided to just relax into this inner urging and longing for the season of advent.

My non-theism is as strong as ever, but I'm reconsidering the role of religion in my life. (Again! Surprise!) My understanding of the world and right-relationship remain very Quaker and probably always will, but that whole-person immersion of rite does have power. It's something I was very suspicious of for years -- just for that reason. I have been afraid of emotionalism, and that held whether I was listening to plainchant or getting caught up in my own mental processes in the silence of meeting. Was it inspiration or self-indulgence? I think, as so often, I've had a baby/bathwater reaction. I have been so very intolerant, especially of myself, and those words at the beginning of Mary Oliver's Wild Geese have come back to me with some force:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

As with religion, so with non-theism. It seems that with or without a creed I find new ways to doubt, and new ways to fall short or feel guilty.

I was weary and sad at the first sight of Christmas on the tv and in the shops this year. Part of it is plain homesickness, but part of it is the usual world-sickness that gets to me so often. Meaningless and noisy and greedy and irritating and harsh and selfish. (I make these judgements not just on "holiday season" adverisments but on myself from time to time. But some of those ads!!) I remembered, with a feeling close to tears, how I used to feel about Christmas. I made an advent wreath for a church at the flowershop the other day and felt a pang for those evenings of candle lighting and anticipation and wonder. I decided to go to church.

That I cannot believe in a literal God has been hurting me for a long time. I've gotten over some of the waves of grief, for sure, and have come to better and deeper understandings, and have a much clearer picture of many things. But the soreness remains, the panic over an infinite universe and my finite (getting more so every day) existence within it. I have read so much and have come to a strong sense of that non-literal-divinity-light-in-all-of-us-take-meaning-from-the-brief-improbable-beauty-of-life thing, which offers me some sense consolation, purpose, and allows me to honour my intellectual integrity. But something is still missing. 

I feel the lack of spirtual (well, and temporal, actually) routine and discipline in my life quite strongly. I'm accomplishing so much, and there's so much going on, and I am traveling all the time, but I lack a centre or a framework for the more transcendent parts of my heart. I ponder and then forget to ponder. I take a step towards service to others and get distracted. I try to prod myself into meditation or a short period of "silent worship" or whatever and it falls aside. Until I wake in the middle of the night, heart pounding, and stare at the ceiling for a long time. 

Split between cities and traveling so much, and also just lacking motivation, I still have no relationship with a Frends' meeting. I think it would help. As I said before, I had violently barred myself from community when I found that I could not summon the belief I thought I needed to participate. Friends were the closest I could get (no creed) but even then I felt like a fraud. Finding the non-theist Friends online helped to open me up to the idea of re-engaging with religion on these new terms, but so far in practice I just haven't gotten it together. But through them I discovered the Sea of Faith network and an ocean of literature by and about people of "non-realist" faith. I don't know, something moved in me. 

It all sounds a bit muddy and weird (and it is) but it's striking home somewhere. This idea that religion has uses even for the atheist and that even the atheist has uses for the church may be infuriating to many but it is meaningful for me. I have been very lonely. To think that perhaps there is a community of heretics who still long for communion, and that there may yet be a home for people like me (in spite of firings and theological quarrels and politics and the usual institutional pain) is comforting. The poem from which the SoF network takes its name is Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold:

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Which...well, wow. A lot to parse and think about, but oh I know that emotion in the last paragraph.

Anyway. I don't know where I am going here with this, exactly, except this: perhaps I can be a little less literal with my non-literalism. I've spent a lot of time sitting with the idea of "true myth" ala Joseph Campbell: over a decade. I've had an intellectual understanding of it, but it felt meaningless emotionally and foggy spiritually. Then I ran into George over at the Post-Modern Quaker a couple of years ago and he gave me a totally new mental framework for Christianity, but it still hasn't settled, entirely. I've been thinking a lot about the deep symbolism of the solstice, and watching that cold stone church warm up and fill up slowly with light from West to East as people passed candles, in a symbolic interpretation of the Light of Christ, was powerful. The singing was powerful. The incense and the ancient words were powerful, even when I didn't take them literally. I left feeling stronger, quieter, more solid, more balanced, more tolerant, more hopeful, more able to extend myself to others. What else is religion for?

I don't know. Perhaps I can revisit the high-church Christianity that my senses crave and my spirit loves, without cringing at the creeds I do not believe. Perhaps I can be a little more generous about the word "God" and a little more patient with the parts of the prayers or the bible that I hate: perhaps I can look deeper, interperet or even dismiss them for myself if I must but perhaps without hatred or rage or a loss of the good. Perhaps there is room for reflection and love and the deep poetry and challenge of this symbolism and story. Perhaps I can bring my Quaker truth about the primacy of experience to the raw primal experience of ritual, if only for a little while. I honestly don't know the answer to any of that, and I know I've broken my brain against these questions a hundred times before, but I do know that a prompting came, strong and clear. I no longer believe that there's an exterior God sending me messages, but I am trying to listen better to those messages that come from that deep part of myself. 

So, for advent, I'm going to attend all the choral services I can between now and Christmas. I'm going to say all the daily prayers and just look for what they have to say to me, regardless of whether I think I'm actually saying them to anyone else.

It's a weird move for me, I admit. But I'm looking forward to it. I am allowing the soft animal of myself to creep towards the manger.