If I’ve been a bit slow on the uptake, I suppose I can blame this lingering lurgy. It’s been two weeks and I’m still lethargic and very conscious that I’m not yet well. I’m better, I think, than I was on Advent Sunday, when I was cold and wobbly and wondering what on earth was wrong with me; certainly better than last Friday, or this Monday; but still not entirely well.
Some friends observed recently that in these days of antibiotics and painkillers (both undoubted benefits to the world at large, let me be clear) we’re stumped by minor illnesses whose symptoms persist. I couldn’t take antibiotics for a cold, and, while I was glad enough of paracetamol and pseudephedrine when my head and ears were aching and I couldn’t breathe without thinking about it, there’s been nothing to be done with the fatigue. Except, of course, waiting. A hundred years ago that would just have been the way things were. You’d have to give your immune system time to do its job, you wouldn’t be able to dose yourself up and power on through.
This year I’ve been reading, very slowly, Kathleen Norris’s The Noonday Demon, in which she examines the cardinal sin/bad thought (depending on which theologians you ask) of acedia. This concept has some overlap with the clinical condition of depression, and is often translated as ‘despair’, but, Norris seems to argue, is perhaps best interpreted as the desire to be somewhere other than where you are. This resonated, often when the toddler just wouldn’t go to sleep, but at other times too.
And recently I picked up Ross Thompson’s Spirituality in Season, in which he talks about three kinds of ‘abyss’, or exclusion:
First, there is exclusion from God, which because God embraces us always, can only be self-wrought; this is sin, leading to hell. Second, there is exclusion from life and being, which by definition is death. And third there is exclusion of our fellow human-beings, which in much of the teaching of Jesus… seems to be equated with the judgement; we are already judged, it seems, by our own response to our neighbour in need.
Then he draws a contrast between the two penitential seasons of Lent and Advent, noting that in Lent we actively confront this abyss (because, as he says, it’s all the same thing) while in Advent we ‘vulnerably experience their great danger, before experiencing at Christmas the one who saves us’.
And then he goes on to talk about waiting, using the example of waiting for a bus. We wait for something (or someone) over whose arrival we have no control at all.
(Here, I would add, we have two options: we can watch, or we can seek distraction. I’m very conscious that lately – the last few months, maybe longer – I’ve been seeking distraction. I’ve been very reluctant to face the inside of my own head, or heart. Too tired. And it’s going to hurt. Maybe. That might or might not be what’s going on. I need to look at that too.)
I read this… in November, if not October. I gleaned some useful facts for my O Antiphons workshop. I noted the reference to W. H. Vanstone’s writing on passivity in the events of Holy Week, which I have also read, and found useful.
And then I spent the first ten days of Advent absolutely hating where I was, furious that I didn’t have the energy to engage in anything that felt like a meaningful observance. And not being able to prepare for Christmas, the sacred or the secular versions, either.
And then it clicked. Waiting. I’m waiting. I’m waiting to feel better. I have very little control over how my body deals with this illness; even my capacity to do nothing is limited. This is, or could be, more meaningful than any Advent devotional book, could teach me more than any twenty-four windows I could open. This is a particularly immersive way to experience waiting, and, therefore, to observe Advent.
Has it helped? Immensely. If nothing else, laughing at my own failure to get it improved at least a couple of days last week. And not at all. Today, for instance, I wrote, I am losing sight of the concept of anything getting better. (And about three minutes after I wrote that, it did.) But that’s the way it goes. If I’d assimilated this brilliant new insight immediately, discovered how to embrace my enfeebled physical state as a symbol of my mortal human state, and glided up to new heights of spiritual consciousness I’d have missed the point, wouldn’t I?
So here I still am. Waiting.
Kathleen Jowitt 