Advent Travels: Church Goes with You

What is clear at 4 a.m. is less so as the day goes on. It rained last night; I sat in the darkness and listened. Christmas is coming, plans are being made. I’m tired and I want to rest.

In Advent, in prayer, a lot opens up and a lot slips away.

I remember Elango all those years ago telling me outside the library in Burlington, it’s not intensity you lack but focus, which struck me as oddly backwards. This was around the time I told Andy I was going to wear my crucifix outside my shirt and he was visibly shocked. Pray on that, he said, and I did because of how it mattered to him.

I used to wake up Dan in the middle of the night, whatever floor or couch we’d fallen asleep on, and say things like, we have to drive to Boston. Or, we have to go into the woods. “My God you’re a fire,” he said once, forcing himself awake at two a.m. to drive us deep into the Northeast Kingdom. I was never happier than watching the sun rise over Lake Memphremagog that morning. The church goes with you or it’s not a church.

By dusk yesterday I realized the hypocrisy in yesterday’s writing: bragging how spiritually mature it was, not publicly engaging with my critic which was, of course, a way of publicly engaging with my critic, which neither surprised nor disappointed me. I’ve been walking in this direction a long time.

Separation is a way of thinking that produces behavior that makes us, singly and collectively, unhappy. We insist that something naturally unified must be held apart, and then expend tremendous energy keeping it apart. But what? What is being held apart?

In Advent, something hidden remains so. I have to accept it may always. I may not reach the manger. And honestly? It’s okay. It’s more than okay.

Yesterday I wrote this sentence to a friend:

It seems clear to me that your relationship with yourself as a writer – a creator, an artist, a free spirit – is somehow damaged and the damage lies in a domain signified primarily by gender and that you have hidden – protected, secured – the requisite healing in a version of Christianity you have yet to discover because you have yet to create it.

. . . and wished someone had written it to me. Like really wished it.

In those days – with Elango, Andy and Dan – I was still studying under Lorrie’s direction, even though we hadn’t talked in years. The reading list she’d left was vast – Derrida and Barthes, Mary Daly, Gertrude Stein. The curriculum was thrilling but private. Nobody knew what I was doing.

I read all the time, wrote as often as possible, and spent the rest of my days dragging men into various arguments that most of them didn’t realize were arguments. Or rather, didn’t realize how high I wanted the stakes to be.

Sawicki is less interested in a therapeutic model for its own sake because of the risk it will devolve into something merely personal, effacing the necessity of ecclesial reckoning. Whatever illusion resurrection penetrates, it must also takes with it the illusion of separate interests. Do you want to see the Lord or not?

My answer, not exactly on point: I don’t want to be seen doing this. Doing what? Writing this way.

Do you see what am I saying about separation? And projection? Do you see what I am not saying?

Dan and I fought exactly once, a terrible argument from which the relationship never recovered. Forty years later I am still baffled and hurt, wishing I could repair the damage. The rest of them it’s okay they’re memories. But I do miss Dan.

In Advent it rains. December softens growing darker. Each sentence this morning was a difficult pill. Who was the desert father who kept a stone in his mouth for thirty years in order to learn what silence was? I want to find his cell and take him in my arms. I want to say, “brother, spit out that rock, let’s talk.”