Eliot Advent

without the meaning there is no time

without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning.

— Choruses from the Rock

Side Effects Include: a Paul Hollywood Handshake

Mortality has been the theme of this fall, certainly of this Advent. And I have been thinking—and talking—and thinking and feeling about death.

Death robs. Death births. Death is the end of all of our lives, and it comes in such a variety of unpredictable ways, there is no neat story to tell about it.

Death is the end of all of our lives, but also it is just a part of our lives. It is a season, like winter. Winter is death each year. We generally don’t think about that, because supermarkets don’t run dry. Winter doesn’t seem as deadly. These days, summer seems much worse.

This season, I have been looking death in the eyes. And wondering how to grieve.

This morning, I realized that the T.S. Eliot volume I have been mindlessly thumbing through each morning before I work my way up to prayer is from my aunt, for a birthday between 10 and 16. I marvel for a moment how stepping stones are laid for you before you need them, before you even know what they are for.

I wonder who bought the shampoo and conditioner (the exact kind I like) in the guest bathroom. A chance picture thumbed through while ignoring my work reveals it was myself, nearly three years ago. We are prophets of a future that is our own, truly.

On Friday, I drove home from Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar (quel nom!) and on my way back looked up and saw the stars.

I had been wondering, only the day before, what the stars must look like out here, where there are no streetlights. Even with the houselights from sub-developments, the stars are so brilliant.

There are moments that stick with you that you live in the memory of your whole life through. One of them is the beach at night on Seabrook Island, and the vision of a sky full of stars, chock full, overcrowded, bursting with stars. In that moment, I knew what God promised Abraham, and I was included in it.

And so, since then, I have looked for the stars. Once I saw the sky above the Atlantic Ocean full of stars, I knew what I could see when I looked up at the night sky, and I have looked for it ever since. It feels like a signpost—a north star, if you will—guiding you. If you can see the stars at night, you must still be within spitting distance of God’s blessing.

To see the stars is to again slip into that moment on the beach—to live in the waves of its consolation. Tonight, I walk out to shut the gate and, unlike the clouds and rain of the past two days, tonight, the sky is cold and clear and the stars are bright. Orion hangs over the house. I am unexpectedly grateful.

I have been alone today, but I have been held. Hani (future Great British Bake Off Star Baker) called me on his bike ride home and told me what I had done wrong to my cinnamon rolls. Thomas and Brigid and I talked about work—and about the very difficult nagging feeling you have when something isn’t adding up—the math is not mathing!—in terms of the narratives you once believed but you haven’t quite found the key to a new one. Things change! That is a kind of death, too. Life is changed, not ended.

You can be rooted by people who are far from you. Or who you cannot see. If death cannot separate us from the ones we love, can distance? Does death separate us? What does it do to us?

I am not sure. But these sorts of unanswerable questions make sense when looking at the stars. That’s where they come from.

Now, when I see the stars—like tonight, on a clear night lit by a crescent moon—I feel quite sure, as my friend Brigid said, that this is a season of gathering strength. A season of feeling something growing and quickening, pulled between the restlessness and the stillness, something very beautiful being birthed (so many labor metaphors these days).

So many labor metaphors, because life is very much about being here and being alive—someone to hold you too close, someone to force you to care, someone to need you too much, someone to know you too well—but all of this living and loving is one great being born into something very beautiful, something that is being made as we are being born.