Welcome to December. The hope that November might stick around for the next 5 months and winter would take the year off and we’d go straight into April has failed once again (I do this to myself every year). If I had my druthers, we’d all wake up tomorrow in shorts and cut-off crop tops. But that ain’t happening. We can’t skip the middle. Luke didn’t master the force sitting in that swamp on Dagobah. Frodo couldn’t destroy the One Ring in the fire of his hearth at Bag End. We can’t get Act 3 without Act 2, we can’t get summer without winter, and we can’t get Christmas without Advent. Speaking of which, it’s day 5, and this is Ironic Advent MediCATION #5. Still on schedule.
In 2008, Barack Obama became president after running a campaign on hope and change. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president after running a campaign on !@#$% and change. Change is a helluva a drug, the idea of change is damned powerful, sometimes to the neglect of obvious and important questions, like, what are we changing into? There’s an old Sam Cooke song about hard times and change, which various social movements have adopted as their anthem.
I was born by the river in a little tent
Oh and just like the river I've been running ev'r since
It's been a long time, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will
That’s how it begins. Here’s how it ends.
There have been times that I thought I couldn't last for long
But now I think I'm able to carry on
It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will
One of the great surprises of growing older has been the realization that I belong to a species which has the potential for bouncing back, for overcoming, for resilience. I learned that in college, I think. I know I don’t have a fraction of the resilience which some people in this country need just to get by. But I do know that resilience is forged in the volcanic fires of Mount You Just Got Your Ass Kicked And You’re Still Alive So Deal With It. Resilience doesn’t come under the tree on Christmas. It’s one of those Advent gifts that you get by despairing, and sitting, and breathing, and crying, and learning how to cuss when you pray.
Ch-ch-ch-changes on planet Earth can be hard. Sometimes they’re too hard. Sometimes they’re more than we can handle, given who we are and what we know when they hit us. And sometimes changes kill us (they’re killing my mother) or they kill the story we’ve been using to make sense of life and we finish the job with pills, or alcohol, or resentment, or cake and ice cream, or buying a new TV every Advent. Sometimes we’re just too damned afraid of everything to make it through. I know I’m afraid.
Change can also be what we need. Last year around this time I went through some changes and I started a new journal. The old one still had some blank pages in it, but it felt so heavy and stale. New wine, old Moleskin. The first entry in that new journal was a quote from Thomas Merton, “Those who think they ‘know’ from the beginning will never, in fact, come to know anything.” Followed by another one, “We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners.” Maybe if I wasn’t such a beginner at this sort of writing I could tie those quotes into the thread I’m working with, but I’ve got some Thoreau stuff to get to, so consider those a stocking stuffer. The real under-the-tree-presents are coming, and I want to talk about clothes. [It should be noted that at this point the author got up from his spot at the coffee shop and gave his phone number to a girl that looked at least 24.]
I’ve been re-reading Walden. I used Amazon used books to buy an old hardback print with good sized font published by Bramhall House. I recommend it. For those who don’t know, Henry David Thoreau was a 19th century American writer and philosopher and I read his books and essays like a guilty Holiness boys reads the Bible. I first read Walden when I was 25 years old and it affected me in a profound and lasting way (and this change, I find, is still unfolding). Thoreau was no armchair philosophiser. You don’t just read him. You go and do likewise. I’d feel a little more blasphemous about that last line if I didn’t interpret Saint Henry’s project as falling more or less in line with what I take to be an authentic expression of Christianity. From Thoreau:
None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, not even to found a school, but to so love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.
For Thoreau, exercising the mind involved a spade and a shovel, beans and potatoes, and a little cabin in the woods. There’s Descartes and his infamous proposition, “Cogito ergo sum.” Then there’s Thoreau, which basically amounts to, “I go on walks, therefore I am.” You can’t just read Thoreau and say, “Yes, I support walks.” You have to go on walks and learn the art of walking, and of trespassing, and of napping in strange places, and what it means to care so little about your possessions that if you decided to just keep walking, you’d feel no anxiety about the life you left behind. It’s extreme. But I prefer to live my life in that direction than in any other.
Right now civilization is in the throes of what it calls the “shopping season” (a reminder: we are in the season of Advent). “Go out and shop,” said the emperor, when the dust and ashes of the World Trade Center were still rising from the earth. Me, I need a little bit of truth tonight. I need to remember that change can mean living through hard times, that change usually requires resilience, and that change comes slowly. It’s not a good pitch for H&M, but a change of clothes does not equal a changed man, no matter what the peddlers tell you:
I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather, something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. [...] Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.
I said to my therapist the other day, “I guess we’re just waiting for a savior.” He asked, “What do you want to be saved from?” I saw the question coming, but I still flashed an embarrassed smirk, couldn’t make eye contact, teared up. It’s easier to ask for some vague, disconnected idea of help or salvation than it is to admit specifically what I fear and what sort of help or saving I need. What do I want to be saved from? I’ll answer that, but not right now. I do, however, think that question leads to another: What kind of savior do I want? And perhaps: What kind of change do I want? Change. I wish I could sit in Yoda’s swamp and master the force. If I could destroy the One Ring in the warm fire at home, I would. But maybe that’s the challenge of Advent. Act 2. The fight, the journey, the adventure, the trek, the mission, the race. All this time we thought we were just sitting around waiting but really a change was taking place. A change is always taking place. A change is gonna come. Small, still, slow, steady change. Or maybe it's not small or slow at all. Maybe it's a little dangerous or maybe it's a pilgrimage out of Babylon. No matter, by the ADVENTure’s end, we’re different, and we aren’t quite sure how it all happened. Then, and not before, can we go buy that new suit.
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