A treat for the Solstice, from my English ancestors to yours. I discovered this beautiful Medieval piece poking through Youtube for lute music to listen to and then promptly forgot about it until tonight. I had recently worked out a fun three-beat picking pattern on the ukulele that sounded really neat, and I adapted the Middle English into modern for a translated verse. The piece itself is a fragment – only the first verse remains. Those who purchase a hard copy of “Panagia” will have this track included as a bonus!
Here’s Track 6 of Panagia, a traditional piece called “The Wexford Carol”!
There haven’t really been any tracks in these albums so
far that have actually featured the harp on its own, so here’s my
setting of this beautiful Irish carol. Its use of Mixolydian mode is
always a rather delightful surprise to me, even after hearing it many
times, and it’s fun to get a chance to flip the harp’s levers in the
middle of playing (or at least, it was once I got the hang of it!) The
words to this carol claim to be quite old, and are as follows:
Good people all, this Christmastime Consider well, and bear in mind What our good God for us has done In sending his beloved Son
With Mary holy we should pray To God with love this Christmas day In Bethlehem upon that morn There was a blessed Messiah born
It took me a long time to think about something to write for
the third week of Advent, which focusses on joy. Many Christians who mark the
liturgical year celebrate the third Sunday as “Gaudete Sunday,†and note it on
the Advent wreath with a pink candle.
At the risk of sounding rather melodramatic, I had a hard
time remembering a moment of joy within the last few years.
It’s not that I’ve been dragging an Eeyore tuckus about the
place! It’s more that I’ve been walking through a bit of a plateau, emotionally
– a pleasant and green place after crawling out of some very deep ravines. We
all need times like this. They ready us for greater heights and depths.
And indeed, I have had times where my heart has swelled with
love in the last couple of years. After leaving a large and wealthy parish that
had trouble imagining any place for me other than children and youth ministry,
the little round parish where I serve today, made up mostly of folks on disability
and middle-income workers who are thrilled to take risks, has been a garden
where the seeds of my ministry have truly been allowed to grow – even take up
space! I have found a home there I never could have imagined.
But that’s not quite the same as joy.
Like hope, joy has teeth. Joy cannot exist outside of a
context that allows for despair. There’s happiness, contentment, delight – but
none of those are joy. Joy is the messiest of the happy emotions, the one that
brings tears to your eyes.
That has been elusive for a long time.
And then, I did find it, just recently.
Some folks know that I have trouble with my birthday,
similarly to how other folks in grief have trouble around the holiday season.
My birthday was one of the only times a year I got to really be with my Dad
one-on-one. He would drive into town and take me to lunch, usually to a Chinese
food place, and we’d talk. After he got settled in Brackendale, and later
Squamish, he opened up a lot more about his life. He shared songs and told me
all about the band he had started, and the friends he had made. Squamish made
him a new man.
The first birthday without him was my thirtieth. I had a ton
of weird baggage around that birthday anyway.To face it without him, especially without the special day I had
tried to plan with him only a few months before he died, made me want to spend
the day under the bed. And man, I don’t even have an under the bed: it’s just a boxspring on the floor.
It’s been five years, and it’s a little easier each time,
but it’s still hard. When I meet new people, I now often don’t even tell them
when my birthday is. I would probably be quite happy never to celebrate it
again.
So imagine my surprise when, entering the Sufi semahane prayer space the Saturday after my birthday, I was caught up in the arms of Seemi, my dear dervish friend, who knew none of these secrets and therefore spun with me right in the centre of the room under the wee skylight, singing, “Happy birthday to you!â€
Now in a sense, this was nothing out of the ordinary. Nearly
every time I am in Seemi’s presence I feel joy wafting off of her like the
scent of fresh-baked bread. Her smile is mirth and stardust.
My surprise was not that Seemi should do something so
celebratory, but that I should suddenly find myself in the arms of an emanation
of God – a mother, beautiful, brown, and Muslim – who took such deep delight in
having me as a friend that it overspilled into my waking world.
Several days before, I woke up at 3am, went into the other
room, and wept soundlessly, unable to comprehend the stony solid fact that all
things pass away, and I would too, and it would be alone.
Now, here in the arms of this dervish who was fully The
Friend for me, my deep gravity (literal grave-ity)
was dismissed as easily as a solitary raincloud in an endless expanse of blue.
“What have you to fear?†cried The Friend, and howled with
laughter. “You think the grave will swallow me?
I’ve made a sand palace of the grave! Come and play with me and we shall knock
it down!â€
My helpless laughter became tears, of course.
Both Friend and friend held me.
In these dark days as we continue to wait for the light that
is coming into the world, perhaps God’s beloved child Mary had a similar
experience in the arms of Elizabeth, both fearful and yet shaking with laughter
at the absurdity of fear in the face of the One who calls us, transforms us,
and sends us out into the world to set it ablaze.
May joy find you, and may you have the patience to ride her
waves.
There was a time where I felt constantly shadowed by death, not only in my exterior but my interior life. I wrestled a lot with sharing this song at all, but in the time of Advent, when we often mark the solstice with “Longest Night†and “Blue Christmas†services, and contemplate not only a joyful birth but the pain and horror that will end the amazing life which is coming into the world, it seemed appropriate. If this song speaks to you, know that you are not alone. I am joined here by my dear friend Thomas, who encouraged me to share it because of how it spoke to him. His support reminded me that lots of folks are too afraid to speak out about their pain, especially at this time of year, and how important it is to name our fears and our demons.
There’s not much to say about this piece except that when I first shared it with dear Thomas, with whom I sing as the duet group Say Goodbye, he noted with good humour, “You don’t do choruses, do you?†After that conversation, I made some changes so that this piece followed a more traditional structure. The title and repeated statements feel more like prayers every day. This song also has a Wiccan/Neo-pagan version, which is dedicated to Thomas and quite different, but arose out of the same tune. ;) I may release that version on one of the Sabbats.
Not long ago our old dishwasher finally kicked the bucket.
We were impressed it lasted as long as it did, as I suspect it was original to
the condo and therefore probably as old as I am. But now the need to go through
the dance of searching and price-comparing is upon us, and until we find The
One we’re relegated to washing dishes by hand.
Honestly, although I’ll be happy to have the old clunker
replaced, I don’t mind washing dishes this way. Out of all the household chores
there are, washing dishes is the least tiresome to me. I’d rather do it than
clean the bathroom or do laundry or even vacuum.
There are a number of reasons I can think of that this is
so. Some of them are quite practical. The hot water feels nice on my hands. The
task itself is fairly simple, and progress is easy to gauge. Dishes must be
used again, so it’s not like other chores that often feel Sisyphean and
meaningless, like wiping soap scum off the sink when I know it’s just going to
reappear in a few days.
I also have good memories of doing dishes. When my father
moved to his house in Port Coquitlam, the kitchen did not come equipped with a
dishwasher. I ended up rather enjoying the post-dinner ritual of washing and
drying and putting away dishes, because, like the long drive to get to his
house, it was time I got to spend with him. I almost always dried rather than
washed, and he was clever enough to somehow trick me into thinking washing
required more responsibility, which meant that when I got to wash it felt like a step up. I still complained about it,
as teenagers do, but secretly I didn’t mind.
Years later, I attended a friend’s wedding held at an island
lodge, and holed up in a cabin during the reception to wash all of the dishes
because I didn’t really know anybody and felt shy. Not only did it calm my
nerves, it somehow felt easier to talk to the few who stood alongside me to
help dry or put away…and then, of course, I was the hero of the day!
Looking at this simple household task in the light of
Advent, I’m struck by the sense of peace I’ve encountered when doing it.
Retreat leaders often stress the importance of “work of
hands†alongside prayer and workshops or reading. Monastics arrange their days
around the same ‘beats’ or movements. Any task, no matter how mundane, can
become an act of prayer. And if peace is already a part of it, so much the
better.
Photo by the Rev. Dr. Marilyn Hames
The second Sunday of Advent focusses on peace, but this
peace is deeper than the rather bloodless concept children sing songs about in
school. Peace is more than the absence of war, and it’s more than the very
solitary feeling most people reference when they talk about “inner peace.†It’s
even more than the feeling I get when I wash dishes by hand, although I suspect
it’s similar. When I wash dishes alone, I often feel myself slip outside time
as the repetitive motions and warmth lull me into a sense of comfort and
stability. I’m held by those earlier memories, that sense of family and purpose
and appreciation. But of course I must remind myself that the memories themselves
are much closer to God’s idea of peace, of which I feel a mere echo as I work,
because those memories are of the task being done together.
And peace is done together, or not at all.
In Advent, we are called to also reflect on the coming peace
that we are promised in the birth of the Prince of Peace. This is beyond any
peace we can fully grasp on earth. This is more than bone deep. This is
Spirit-deep.
My prayer for you is that, wherever it may reside in your
life, you may find and lean into peace…and then share it with others.
I wrote this in late July after reading a Twitter thread by writer Kai Cheng Thom about how trauma affects interactions among marginalized peoples. It’s amazing to me that the human body can heal itself of superficial and severe injury through medicine, the strange magic of sleep, and a healthy diet, but it occurred to me that we must take a more active role in mental, emotional, and spiritual healing, and how very difficult that is. We have to untangle neural pathways in the brain that may have been helpful to us once but no longer are. I thought of grief, and how much longer it took me to fully grieve than I thought it would (and how indeed grief is unending), and then I thought of the kind of faith I have now versus the kind of faith I had as a younger person. It’s all a process, and yet it is so much easier when we find each other, when we do the work together. Can we hold each other?
Here’s the second track of “Panagia,” this year’s Advent devotional music project! It’s called “Anima Sola.”
This is the first song I wrote for guitar, although the original lyrics, while similar, have since been lost. I’ve been fascinated for years by the image of the Anima Sola, or “Lonely Soul,” which I first saw printed on the side of a devotional candle I bought in a Voodoo shop in New Orleans. The image of a female soul chained and reaching out to grasp her liberator stuck with me. I wanted to balance that sense of initiative, desire, and drive with a sense of humility, which is why the soul goes from being a desired equal to being a willing servant who admits vulnerability to being a lover, willingly allowing herself to be vulnerable through trust in the beloved. St. John of the Cross has been a spiritual mentor to me as well, so I threw in a reference to his masterpiece The Dark Night of the Soul. I’ve always tried my best to see the difficult parts of life as an opportunity to draw myself closer to the one who holds me through the night.
Stay tuned for the next track, which drops this Sunday at 10am!
The season of Advent is my favourite season of the church
year. The music is great, the darkness and length of the nights highlights the
beauty of the approaching light, and we look forward to the pageantry of
Christmas.
Each week traditionally focuses on a theme, and they usually
run in the following order: hope, peace, joy, and love.
For hope, I paged through an old journal and found an entry
from my ordination retreat in the summer of 2016. While pretty far removed from
the dark of Advent, I am struck by the memory of the despair that visited the
world that week. We woke on the first full day of the retreat to the news that
a colleague’s brother had been murdered, and the horror of the Pulse nightclub
shooting in Orlando.
The other ordinands and I sat and stared at each other. So, I remember thinking, this is the world that we’re being called to
serve.
It seemed like a pretty tall order. And frankly, I didn’t
know if I could handle it. I was dealing with some pretty debilitating despair
of my own at the time, mostly due to burnout and buckets of anxiety about this
ridiculous thing I had decided to do with my life.
But despite my memory of that feeling of terrible fear and weight, I also found this:
“What does it mean to live as an incarnate and aggressively visible sign of hope? Hope for today, hope for tomorrow, hope in the unthinkable, the outright nonsense of resurrection? Hope for the justice we are promised, the justice at the end of the arc of the universe? Hope for the best humanity has to offer when so much more often we are left with the worst thorns of hatred and death?
There is an ancient statement of belief that may be
ridiculous but sometimes I wonder… The idea that the crucifixion was like a
lure, a fish hook to catch the devil.
A tragedy should never be colonized by empty, futile
optimism.
Hope, like joy, has teeth.
In the cyclones of the world, in the whirling noisy mess of
our heavy grieving lives, perhaps if we are foolish enough, the rage, fear, and
anger of the world can become a fish hook.
A fish hook for God.
A fish hook for good, for sacrifice, for peace, for joy, for
love.
A brutal thing that ensnares and draws out, a tool for
torment and death, an alarm for the sleeping cynic, a kick in the pants, a
chance to scream, “This shall not stand,†a way to reach up into totally
foreign and vulnerable territory in order to give refreshment to others.
A lure for the God held within each heart.
A spark to light an inferno of compassion.
Not for the devastated. For us, who hug and cook and cry and sit in silence, cradling all of
the shitty gorgeous mess of a shattered spirit, blood and water spilling over
the brim, out of our tiny arms – so small, too small to hold it all, but
someone has to.
Because why the fuck else are we doing this? What’s the
point if not to embrace the agony and explode it with our own brokenness?
What’s the point of mockery if the scorned laugh back?
What’s the point of desecration when the rich lay down their
cloaks for a beggar?
What’s the point of calling someone worthless when they keep
giving away everything they own?
So turn cartwheels in the ruins and treat paupers as
princes. Sit and allow futile silence to be the third friend at your meeting of
grief.
Do not do as the world does and fill it with platitudes, or
attempt to avoid contamination, as though we could avoid our own decaying,
beautiful flesh.
Some of my long-term followers may know that for the last three years I have made a devotional practice of recording songs and releasing them week by week in the seasons of Advent and Lent.
This year’s Advent offering is called “Panagia,” which means “All Holy,” an Eastern Orthodox title of the Virgin Mary.
The first track just dropped today! It’s called “Violet Blue.” This was written in the middle of summer, but on a cool night with many layered clouds. It struck me then and strikes me still that every human culture has a wintertime ritual, and it makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. All of these rituals tend to focus on the endurance of light and the coming of spring, but also a more general tendency to tell stories – perhaps merely a natural result of being in close quarters with one another for an extended period of time, but by its very nature bonding us, weaving us closer together. Winter might be a difficult time for many folks, but I will always love her for holding us within her womb until the light returns, and helping us to remember our roots.
I’ll be posting the rest of the album here regularly. :) Enjoy!
