The cusp of Advent

At Mattins and Evensong on this Friday, the collect remains that of the Sunday next before Advent: "Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord ...". Tomorrow at Mattins we will pray the Stir-up collect for the last time this year.  As the late November sun sets tomorrow afternoon, 1st Evensong of Advent Sunday will be said or sung. Advent will begin and Cranmer's great words will ring out, heralding in the season: "give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light".

We are on the cusp of Advent.

This morning it is cold and dark.  The fields remain sodden after recent heavy rain. Sunrise is well after 8am. There will be less than 8 hours of daylight. We are now in the dark days before Christmas.

There are, however, no Christmas decorations yet to be seen in the neighbourhood.  That will come on Sunday or with 1st December.  

For now, there is a sparseness that reflects the dark days, the bare landscape turning to Winter, the colder weather.

Such sparseness is appropriate for these last days in which we pray the Stir-up collect, this cusp of Advent. It is a sparseness which prepares us for the Advent hope; a sparseness which points to our profound need of the Advent hope.

Turned from the Light, our fruit is meagre, our hearts cold.

Recognising this sparseness prepares us to pray, "Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness".

The days, of course, will continue their descent into darkness until the Winter Solstice. Colder weather will come. And the landscape will remain bare for the months ahead.  December, however, will soon fill with the activity, light, and warmth of preparations for the festive season. 

None of this should be begrudged. The meaning and observance of Advent is not aided by ecclesiastical Scrooges bemoaning Christmas trees and resenting carols in early December. Nor is Christianity's cultural presence aided by a sectarian rejection of popular festivities marking the Nativity of Christ. 

The liturgy of Advent itself is often so enriched that any notion of a spiritually meaningful sparseness is almost entirely obscured.  This is not only a matter of the introduction of Advent Wreaths and associated ceremonies, themes for each of the Sundays, and proper prefaces for the season (not to be found in 1662).  Much of the elegiac imagery in which Advent is immersed can be overwhelming.

Rowan Williams has warned of the dangers of this "richness of [Advent's] religious eros". Too easily this can become merely "another vehicle for human self-reflection". I have written elsewhere - and perhaps without enough recognition of pastoral realities - of the need for a sparse Advent liturgy. This post, however, is not about that. 

It is, rather, about these days on the cusp of Advent.

These days characterised by the sparseness of late November and the week of Stir-up.

The meaning and significance of these sparse days on the cusp of Advent is perhaps seen in Williams' poem, 'Advent Calendar'. It is striking the first three verses flow not from a rich Advent liturgy but from the sparse landscape of these days of late Autumn and early Winter - "leaf's fall ... November wind ... frost ... mist ... bursting red December sun":

He will come like last leaf’s fall.

One night when the November wind

has flayed the trees to bone, and earth

wakes choking on the mould,

the soft shroud’s folding.

He will come like frost.

One morning when the shrinking earth

opens on mist, to find itself

arrested in the net

of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.

One evening when the bursting red

December sun draws up the sheet

and penny-masks its eye to yield

the star-snowed fields of sky.

It is these sparse days on the cusp of Advent - when the last leaf falls, when late November winds blow, when frost and mist descend, and late afternoon is marked by red sunsets - that draw us into that "spirit of 'poverty'" which Williams identifies as essential for Advent:

of the knowledge that we cannot talk and touch ourselves into life; of that deep poverty of the imagination which can only stand helplessly before the outrages and miseries of our world, utterly at a loss for a word of meaning or hope to speak.

There is no rich liturgy for these days, no elegiac hymns.  There is not yet the abundance of festive sights and sounds we will see and hear in December.

Just the darkened, cold, bare days, a reflection of our darkened, cold, bare souls.

So at Mattins on these days on the cusp of Advent, we can but pray that "the dayspring from on high" might visit us with light and warmth, as at Evensong on this day we can but pray "Lighten our darkness": that fruit may be borne even in a cold time and in hardened soil.

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.