Is there One Advent—or Several?

We have been meditating on the Dark Night of the Soul and Society and our Species because it is Advent and Winter Solstice, a time of darkness in the Northern hemisphere. 

And because we anticipate a great “Coming of Light” arriving with Hannukah, Christmas and Kwanzaa following on the shift toward greater light that December 22 promises.

Humanity is awaiting another period of darkness, it seems, that awaits us on January 20, 2025:  A dark night of oligarchy.   

Like Mechtild of Magdeburg whom we listened to last week and who counseled us to “embrace the very same love that wounded” us, poet Adrienne Rich teaches that

If we could learn to learn from pain
even as it grasps us…. 
And observe that
She [Marie Curie] died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.  

Part of the mystery of existence is the play between the Via Positiva and the Via Negativa, the joy and the suffering in life.  The paradox and interaction of the two come together in a special way in the Advent-Solstice/Christmas-Hanukkah-Kwanzaa seasons.

Meister Eckhart speaks to this reality when he says: “everything praises God.  Darkness, privations, defects, evil too, praise God and bless God.”  Mystics—and the mystic in all of us—learns to be at home with paradox.

In 1918, Dorothy Day was arrested for picketing with militant suffragists and thrown into jail for the first (but certainly not the last) time.  She wrote of the pain she underwent there:  The blackness of hell was all about me.  The sorrows of the world encompassed me.  I was like one gone down into a pit.  Hope had forsaken me. I was that mother whose child had been raped and slain.  I was the mother who had borne the monster who had done it.  I was even that monster, feeling in my own heart every abomination. 

 Moral imagination and compassion were born from her encounter with darkness.

Poet Rainer Maria Rilke underwent a profoundly painful childhood, locked in the attic frequently by his mother for long periods of time.  From it all he learned something of both praise and pleasure.

Oh, tell us, poet, what do you do?

                                                          I praise.

But the deadly and the violent days,
how do you undergo them, take them in?

                                                          I praise.

But the namelessness—how do you raise
that, invoke the unnameable?

                                                          I praise.

What right have you, through every phase,
in every mask, to remain true?

                                                          I praise.

–and that both stillness and the wild affray
know you, like star and storm?

                                                Because I praise. 

Molly Rush was a grandmother of seven who was jailed for protesting the Trident submarine which houses more destruction that all human wars combined, including the atomic bombs of WWII.  When asked what she learned from jail she replies, “I have a greater sense of the preciousness of life.” She learned this because walking the prison yard she noticed after a while tiny flowers in the mud—“when that’s about all there is to see, they become precious.”

Maty the trials and tribulations we are encountering this advent also raise our consciousness of preciousness and desire to praise. And resist and act.

To be continued.

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Adapted from Matthew Fox, ”Being Emptied: Letting Pain be Pain: Kenosis,” in Fox, Original Blessing, pp. 140-144.

See also: Fox, “Letting Go and Letting Be: Via Negativa,” in Fox, Meditations with Meister Eckhart, pp. 35-64.

To read a transcript of Matthew Fox’s video teaching, click HERE.

Banner image: “Dawn’s Early Light.” Photo taken of sunrise near the winter solstice, by JLS Photography – Alaska on Flickr.

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Queries for Contemplation

How do Mechtild of Magdeburg, Adrienne Rich, Dorothy Day, Molly Rush, and Meister Eckhart speak to the darkness you are experiencing this Advent and Solstice, 2024? Does a greater sense of the preciousness of life arise in you even in the midst of grief?

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Recommended Reading

Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality

Matthew Fox lays out a whole new direction for Christianity—a direction that is in fact very ancient and very grounded in Jewish thinking (the fact that Jesus was a Jew is often neglected by Christian theology): the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality, the Vias Positiva, Negativa, Creativa and Transformativa in an extended and deeply developed way.
“Original Blessing makes available to the Christian world and to the human community a radical cure for all dark and derogatory views of the natural world wherever these may have originated.” –Thomas Berry, author, The Dream of the Earth; The Great Work; co-author, The Universe Story

Meditations with Meister Eckhart: A Centering Book

A centering book by Matthew Fox. This book of simple but rich meditations exemplifies the deep yet playful creation-centered spirituality of Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart was a 13th-century Dominican preacher who was a mystic, prophet, feminist, activist, defender of the poor, and advocate of creation-centered spirituality, who was condemned shortly after he died.
“These quiet presentations of spirituality are remarkable for their immediacy and clarity.” –Publishers Weekly.