O come, great daystar, radiance bright,
And heal us with your glorious light.
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadow put to flight.

Sunday last was the first Sunday of Advent. This time of year always seems to me mysterious; full of whispers of wonder, and of darkness and light.  Here in Booterstown thick snow covered the ground, the snow laden trees turned our yard into fairyland and the sun shone brightly in the blue sky.  In the evening we marked the day with the blessing of our Advent wreath, evening prayer and Kris Kindle.  After that came the extended six o’clock news as our Taoiseach outlined the eighty five billion euro bailout for Ireland from Europe to help with our financial woes.

The four weeks of Advent bring us readings at Mass from the prophet Isaiah.  This is rightly so since he is the greatest of the messianic prophets.  He is a man of extraordinary vision and heartfelt religious conviction combined with great power of poetic expression.  There is a deep current of joy and hope in his writing.  He looks beyond the afflictions of the present to an era of universal peace.  He wrote during the second half of the eighth century BC at a time of great national crisis during the Assyrian invasions of Palestine.  It was the role of the prophet to lift the spirits of his people, and to show the providence of God at work even in the midst of disaster.  We celebrate Advent in the certainty of the Lord who has already appeared to us, for whom we must prepare ourselves.  Traditionally on Christmas Day there are three Masses. The opening lines of the three of them bring us hope.  Midnight Mass begins with the words, ‘The Lord said to me, ‘You are my son, today I have begotten you.’  The Dawn Mass opens with, ‘Today a light will shine upon us,’ and the third Mass begins with, ’For to us a child is born, to us a son is given.’

Recently the Irish Literature Exchange which translates books by Irish authors into various languages so that they are on sale around the world celebrated the translation of 1,500 works.  Colm Toibin spoke at the function and said that at present we are making world headlines because of our economic crisis, but that a much more deeply influential image of our country emanates from the culture we send around the world, our music, books, paintings and poetry.  They move and spread and do not recognize boundaries.  The words from novels and poems, colours and images from paintings and melodies from music move like the Danube from country to country, creating fertile plains rather than borders.  He made the point that Ireland and Afghanistan do not yet have a relationship in trade or diplomacy but yet the blue in the Book of Kells – the Western world’s most beautifully illuminated manuscript and a lasting symbol of Irish creativity – came to us from Afghanistan so many years ago.  This rare brilliant blue colour was obtained from a precious stone which , at the time, was only found in the mountains of Afghanistan , the blue which is culture riding the waves with which politics, economics and diplomacy still have problems. Toibin says that the primary value of culture is not material, it is spiritual, or it is not of much value at all. It is more enduring, more embedded, more deeply influential, and we are enriched through it in ways that cannot be measured.

Karl Rahner has said that there are words which by a kind of enchantment produce in the person who listens to them what they are expressing, that they are like sea shells in which can be heard the sound of the ocean of infinity, no matter how small they are in themselves. Even if the words are obscure they evoke for us the blinding mystery of things, they hold us in their power.  He calls these primordial words and says that no matter what they speak about, they always whisper something about everything.  It is to the poet that these words have been entrusted, the poet has the power to speak them in such a way that, through them, things move into the light of others who hear them.

In his ‘Journals’ George Seferis, the Greek poet , and 1963 winner of the Nobel prize for literature came to the realization that the work of his fellow Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy, was ‘strong enough to help’ in time of trouble.   I think we also recognize that some part of the meaning of our lives is in the words and cadences of cherished passages of poetry.  Was this the reason that Patrick Kavanagh’s  poem  ‘Advent’ came to my mind last Sunday evening as I struggled to comprehend and understand what the Taoiseach was saying?  When things get beyond us do we need the poet’s voice to express for us the inarticulate speech of our hearts?

Like Kavanagh’s life, and all our lives, and life in Ireland at present, the poem is full of paradoxes.  He is weary from all the knowledge, thinking, analyzing and experiences which have filled his life and mind, and his zest and enthusiasm have been sapped.  The first beautiful line,

‘We have tested and tasted too much, lover –‘

suggests what we feel when we are satiated with too much of anything, in using the word ‘lover,’ perhaps he is talking to his inner self.  The second spellbinding line,

‘Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder,’

says for us, that less, very often, is more.  We know that in Ireland in the past, Advent and Lent were observed as periods of penance and fasting.  They were times for looking forward, for cleansing.  Adult men, working long hours, often at arduous physical work carefully measured out the amount of food they were allowed.  Living simply and being content with little, for Kavanagh,

‘ … will charm back the luxury/Of a child’s soul.’

This is what he really wants, to have the mind of a child again, to be able to wonder at everything.  Have you ever gone for a walk with a two year old and a three year old?  Blackberries are exotic fruits, thistledowns are a marvel, flowers and weeds from the ditches have to be collected and brought home, a horse or a cow in a field is there to be admired, wondered at, greeted and fed, the neighbours’ dogs are old friends, saluted by name.

The second verse of the poem brings memories from Kavanagh’s childhood in rural Monaghan.

‘the spirit-shocking/Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill,
‘… the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables …’

The next verse is full of the wonder that he hopes he will experience once again when he rids himself of his excess baggage, materially, mentally, emotionally.   The simplest of things will be magical,

‘Wherever life pours ordinary, plenty.’

That will be enough,

‘Won’t we be rich, my love and I,’

In the last lines the imagery is from the world of money and finance, ‘the clay-minted wages,’ ‘reason’s payment,’ ‘analyse.’  The final line,

‘And Christ comes with a January flower.’

summons up for me snowdrops and crocuses, perhaps peeping up out of the snow.  It suggests that we will have contentment when we return to simplicity.  ‘Christ,’ maybe, is the image of fulfillment, of all that is important.

Isaiah tells us that disasters have happened before.  The poem reflects our present reality, the climate of financial paranoia, the need to be truly content with less, the need to open our minds to see life differently, to be astonished at everyday redemptions.  The solution may be in our spirit – of courage, energy and determination.  We know we cannot return to the gold of childhood innocence already past.  We can never recreate it exactly because we are different now.

Kavanagh, in ‘Self Portrait,’ 1964, said, ‘There are two kinds of simplicity, the simplicity of going away and the simplicity of return.  The last is the ultimate in sophistication.   In the final simplicity we don’t care whether we appear foolish or not.  We talk of things that earlier would embarrass us.  We are satisfied with being ourselves, however small.  Curious this, how I started out with the right simplicity, indifferent to crude reason, and then ploughed my way through complexities and anger and ill-will towards the faults of man, and then came back to where I started.’

Perhaps during Advent we will rediscover our original simplicity.

Advent

We have tested and tasted too much, lover –
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in this Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child’s soul, we’ll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use.

And the newness that was in every stale thing
When we looked at it as children: the spirit-shocking
Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill,
Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking
Of an old fool, will awake for us and bring
You and me to the yard gate to watch the whins
And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.

O after Christmas we’ll have no need to go searching
For the difference that sets an old phrase burning –
We’ll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning
Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching.
And we’ll hear it among simple, decent men, too
Who barrow dung in gardens under trees,
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Won’t we be rich, my love and I, and please
God we shall not ask for reason’s payment,
The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges,
Nor analyse God’s breath in common statement.
We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour –
And Christ comes with a January flower.

Patrick Kavanagh

Mary Coyle rsm
South Central Province