Into the Heart of Advent — introduction

We're into Advent now, and in response to Charleen's request I've promised to blog again this year the readings of my book Into the Heart of Advent that I posted last year.

I checked with SPCK, who published the book and so hold the rights to it, and they have kindly given their permission. Accordingly I have volunteered (they didn't require this of me) each day to link you to where you can buy the book if you prefer text over having me read to you.

Today is the introduction, Day 1 is tomorrow, and the readings finish on Christmas Day.

 

Into the Heart of Advent is available from a variety of bookshops. You should be able to buy it direct from the publisher but I see they have let it go out of stock and anyway their despatch times are slow.  

You can get it from: 

Eden online bookshop, currently selling at £7.64 and they will give you up to £5 off your first order.

US Amazon. Low stock and much cheaper in Kindle ($8.99) than paperback ($18.87).

UK Amazon. Kindle (£5.69) is cheaper than paperback (£8.32).

If you have any difficulties getting the text — I see stocks are low, so the books may sell out — let me know and I will add the text for each day to the blog posts. I could do that anyway but I think it might be a bit mean on my publishers who depend on their writers for their living.

If you want the text but are really on your beam ends for money at the moment, tell me. Your comments on this blog reach me privately and I do not need to publish them. If you write your email address in your comment, I will not publish it and can correspond with you. 

Oh — incidentally — a reviewer, in the Church Times last year, complained that there was no mention of the pandemic. That's because publishing a book takes a while, so the manuscript had to be submitted at the beginning of 2020, before the pandemic began. So if it seems odd to have no mention of Covid, well, that's why.

Just one day

 Life is challenging and so are other people sometimes.

Here is a practice I find helpful.

For just one day — this day only — make your mantra and your practice and your focus, "I am here for love; only that."

Leave for another day the struggle for truth and justice, for setting people right and facing up to conflict, for cleaning house and dealing with the to-do list. 

Just for this day — "I am here for love". 

Let it be the prayer your life offers for just one day.

❤️

Finding things online

I never get over the astonishment at Google's capacity to find things I've lost.

If there's anything I don't know or I've forgotten, I ask as if Google were an actual person, and almost always find an answer — with a few supplementary questions sometimes, just as would happen in a conversation with a friend.

So last night while everyone else in our house was out at choir, I was listening to music in my room. Very rarely am I the only one home, and I dislike earbuds/earphones, and I don't like to disturb the others by playing music when they're home, especially in the evening when we've all settled down in our cells, so to speak — Thursday, being choir, is a good night. No one home but us chickens.

I was wandering happily from song to song, when I took a fancy to listen to The Soul of Man Never Dies. I looked it up and there were several versions on Youtube, mostly men, mostly American bluegrass — which I like but wasn't what I had in mind. 

I used to have that song in my personal collection of music. Back in 2012 when I downsized everything radically, I gave away my collection of CDs, first having moved the songs onto my computer. 

Time went by. I changed my computer, I changed my phone, and somewhere along the line I inadvertently set up a second iTunes account, when my email address morphed from Googlemail to Gmail. At some point when I got a new phone and went to sync my phone and computer, I could only go with the one account for music (obviously, to be synced) and thus lost the music I'd not bought on iTunes in electronic form but only moved across from CDs. In among it was the version I used to have (and loved) of The Soul of Man Never Dies.

I searched, but couldn't find it. So I thought back to when I first heard it, which was when we were living in Aylesbury. Tony and I moved there when we got married in 2006, and only stayed three years before moving back to Hastings at the end of 2009. It took me a while to get to know Aylesbury, and find where concerts happened and where the Quaker Meeting House was and all that sort of thing. I used to go to the lunchtime concerts in the church; they were free, so I went most weeks, but only went once that I can remember to the paying sort that happened in a little theatre in the evening — to hear the woman who sang The Soul of Man Never Dies. 

I remembered the concert, and the woman. I remember she said she liked Berocca (vitamins) which I'd never heard of and checked out later and didn't especially enjoy. But I couldn't remember her name.

I reckoned this must have been around 2007, to allow enough time for me to have got to know the town, so I did a Google search for "English woman folk singer Aylesbury 2007", and there she was — Kate Rusby.

So I searched again for "Kate Rusby The Soul of Man Never Dies" — which is how I discovered the reason I couldn't find it before is Kate Rusby calls that song Canaan's Land.

And here, for your listening pleasure, it is.

Sources of joy — demonetising

 My mother was a complex woman, from a family with a lot of mental illness. She herself had suicidal depression and was under treatment for it her whole adult life. At the point of her death she was on the max dose she could have, but was still seized with anxiety and terror. But her personality, like everyone's, was many faceted. She also had (I know this sounds incompatible) a sort of casual insouciance — "Oh, it'll be all right," she'd say. And she found much of life funny; she laughed a lot. As well as that she was shrewd and careful (she made some seriously ill-advised decisions toward the end of her life, but I expect many people do), not miserly but never one to overspend.

She loved material things — her furniture and paintings, her clothes and china, her jewellery, her ornaments, her rugs and curtains, pretty much everything in her home, even her handkerchiefs and nightdresses. She loved her car. She liked doing ordinary domestic things — enjoyed driving around rural England buying things and going out for coffee, while she still could.

For all this you need money, and well-judged investment meant she reached old age with plenty of it. 

But it intrigued me that I never saw her look so truly happy as when she gave it away. She gave me and my sister some truly enormous dollops of money in the course of her life, and when she did so I saw more joy in her than anything else ever brought her.

St Paul said the love of money is the root of all evil, and we do well to pay attention to that observation, because it's true.

I personally find money more than useful — necessary. I know there are people who live entirely without money, and I esteem them, but I also notice they depend on the money everyone else has, to create the infrastructure in which they continue to participate. I mean, if you have a bad ankle break, it is money that makes it possible for society to work together with the end result of fixing your ankle — the manufactured and equipped ambulance and paramedics, the pain meds and antibiotics and surgical instruments, the surgeon and nurses and anaesthetist and hospital with its theatre and wards and communication system and lights and kitchen and plumbing and sheets on the beds . . . all these have to come from somewhere, which implies co-operation, and money is like a kind of machine oil that keeps everything working together. Without money, in that scenario, you'd have a lot of pain, you might die of blood loss or infection, and you'd probably have a deformed (and probably painful) foot for life. Even if you were one of the people who lives without money, all that would still be true.

So I don't even try to live without money, but at the same time I try hard to demonetise my life — to give things away, to share, to recycle and upcycle and swap and re-use and make things for myself out of stuff left over.

I have made hats out of dish towels, dresses out of old sheets, a bed base and shelves from a fence we replaced with a hedge that we grew from cuttings from friends' gardens. Our pets have been rescue animals, not bought from breeders. In my room almost nothing was bought from a shop, but made for me with love. I have a chair — a plastic garden chair a lady along the road was throwing out because she no longer wanted it. When I expressed interest she washed it up as good as new and brought it along for me.

I know we all need some money to get by, so I try to buy some things from small family firms — my warm winter cardigans come from the wool of sheep in the Pennine hills spun and knitted and sold by a small firm in Leicestershire. The meat in my shopping basket that will be delivered to my home on Friday comes from this farm in Staffordshire.

But some things — like the bread I'll be toasting for my tea in an hour or so — come from the big supermarket at the end of the road. Although it's a big corporation (Asda) it also has a very benign presence in the community, collecting for the food bank, and allowing schoolchildren to eat free in the café, and helping generously with various community projects. There are two reasons I like to shop there — one is that the products are cheap, which makes my money go further so I have more to give and share; the second reason is that I can walk to it, so I don't have to run a car or even spend money on a bus. 

I believe in walking, and living simply, and owning little, and sharing what we have. 

So, although this may seem contradictory, I both accept the necessity of money and believe in demonetising my life. I think it's all there in that word "currency" — I see it like a stream flowing through the landscape for the nourishment of all the people and animals and plants on its banks (yes, the banks — where we keep a little set aside for the needs of our lives, and for contingencies).

I think security and peace and contentment can flow from having enough money to participate in society — but I think joy comes from demonetising; from giving, sharing, making things yourself, writing your own books and getting together to make music, growing your own food, making friends with wild creatures, gathering food from the hedgerows.

Sources of joy — being loved

 One of the greatest sources of joy is being loved. It is comforting and makes me happy.

In the mornings, every day, my husband makes me a cup of tea when he makes his own, and brings it upstairs to me.

I usually wake early but spend the first couple of hours of the day doing things online or writing, so that means I have a cup of tea in bed every morning. Nettle tea is my tipple.

Here's my cup of tea from this morning.

But the thing is, there's more than just a cup of tea in that picture. It's a photograph of love.

Having a cup of tea brought up to me every single morning feels like the most amazing luxury — it makes me feel most extraordinarily loved and blessed. 

But then, there's the cup the tea is in. My youngest daughter saw it when she was living in London, and thought I'd like it, and bought if for me, because she loves me. I drink my morning tea from it every day. The tea is made with love and the cup was chosen and given with love.

Then there's the thing the cup is standing on. I asked my husband (he's a woodworker) if he would make me a little white cupboard to cover the electric sockets on the wall by my bed — I think electric sockets are very useful but also very ugly. So he did. He made it for me carefully and precisely, and put it on the wall for me, just because I wanted it and he loves me. And it made a dinky little bedside table right by my bed, perfect for my cup of tea. How lucky am I?

And then there's the wall, painted yellow — but not by me. A few years ago, my husband painted that room pale green for me, at my request, and it was lovely; but over time I decided it was not quite right — I wanted spice box colours. So he dismantle my wardrobe (which he made for me) and took out my bed (which he made for me) and unscrewed the socket cover that he made for me, and admitted my room all over again, in the colours I wanted — two shades of yellow and a shade of green, including the ceiling. It's perfect now. So my room is painted in love and furnished with love, and how blessed can one person be?

But look, there's also the calligraphy above the cup. That was made for me by my eldest daughter as an encouragement and affirmation of faith when our family was going through difficult times. It was her gift of love to me. I had it framed and hung it on my wall, and every day I see it and it reminds me that she loves me and made something beautiful for me, and that God loves me and has a shining path for me to walk in and I will not miss my way because his love over-shines me.

This — this love that surrounds me and upholds me and nourishes my soul, is a source of joy to me.

Who loves you? If nobody loves you at all, there are dogs waiting to be rescued. Dogs have so much love to give.

Sources of joy — music

Well, I am very blessed to share a home with musicians, which means that on any evening there's a chance of the house having Mozart arias billowing around it as violin and flute duets — and that brings me joy for sure!

To participate in music is probably the most joyous of all. Here's the father of my children as a young man singing with the friends we lived with in York, and here are my children playing for a chapel Christmas coffee morning a few years ago.

A memory's treasure for me is the long-gone days of sitting round the table singing folk songs after supper — I am so glad I had that in my life, even if it has gone now. Norma Waterson and her family and friends singing together reminds me of those days. We still sing round the piano sometimes, and it's a wonderful thing that we have such a wealth of music online, and here are some of my favourites:

• Just about anything by George Ezra — I love Budapest, Shotgun and this glorious video of Listen to the Man with Ian McKellen.
• I love the music of Joni Mitchell, and I used to have her album Blue and listen to it over and over. My favourite song of all was Carey.
• I love classical music too, of course, and Mozart is my favourite composer — just about anything by Mozart, but two favourites are the Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute, and this aria from The Marriage of Figaro (though I wish Dame Kiri of the sublime voice wouldn't slide the notes so much). Oh, and there's the incomparable Laudate Dominum from Mozart's Vespers, sung here by Cai Thomas. When I was writing my Hawk and Dove novels, it was one of the pieces in which I soaked my soul. 
• I love music from a variety of religious traditions — like the songs of Taizé, or the Plum Village community, or the a cappella harmonies of Anabaptist choirs, or this long and beautiful chant from Robert Gass and friends which was the last thing my husband Bernard heard on this earth; his soul slipped free and left us just as it finished playing. He had the Mozart Laudate Dominum (above) at his funeral, and chose this to play as we bore his coffin in.

And there's so much more! It's like being able to get joy in a packet like butter or flour — you just open it up and there it is for you. 

Sources of joy: colour

 I made a little poster out of these words that appealed to me.

That says exactly what I feel is my path for this present time.

If I ask myself what contribution I can make in these days of transition when the edifices of the past are crumbling and the future so scarily uncertain, I have to acknowledge the only things I can offer have this in common: they are all extremely small.

Every passing day brings urgent calls for money from people whose need is dire — those who have to watch their children starve, those who have no clean water (or even none), those unjustly imprisoned, those facing homelessness and destitution, refugees who have lost everything; also animals abandoned or tortured in vivisection laboratories and factory farms; and people trying to create a better future by regenerative farming and planting trees — all of them deserve funding, and what I have doesn't go very far at all.  

When it comes to activism and political commitment, again I can offer so little. I get tired easily and quickly, I have low energy levels these days.

But I think it is possible to keep faith with the purposes of God simply by maintaining a quiet radiance. 

I like this website about joy — they made a good video, which you come to if you scroll down the page. 

And then I saw this on Facebook today —

— and my heart immediately acknowledged the connection between gratitude and joy.

In years past I was somewhat sceptical of the whole follow-your-bliss school of thought, but I have come to accept that happy people are good to be around, and it is extremely hard to make someone else happy if you are not happy yourself. 

I also remember vividly how luminous and infectious was the joy I saw in others that first drew me to discover the presence of Jesus for myself.

So I think raising one's vibration and reaching for joy form an essential part of spiritual practice, and are a gift to others in days when so many are anxious and afraid.

Joy doesn't depend on money, status, power or success — you can just rootle about and find it like a pig looking for truffles, in the ordinary everyday circumstances of life.

But you can't be joyful if you don't honestly feel it — pretend joy has an uneasy artificiality in it; toothy grins and a bogus gleam in the eye are a poor substitute.Therefore, you have to look for sources of joy, in order to keep raising your own vibration so you have something to share. You have to forage for joy.

Giving this some thought, I reflected on what is a source of joy for me, and certainly colour is. I love colour. I like the sun on brick walls or filtering through stained glass. I like russet apples, and citrus fruits. I like the flames of a burning log on the hearth. 

Today, just for a brief while, the setting sun slanted across beneath the brooding grey November clouds to shine on the chimneys of the house opposite —

— and that shone a light of joy into my heart.

I particularly enjoy the colours of my clothes and the blanket on my bed. 

They make me happy.

So do my earrings.

I know these are only small and humdrum things, but so what? My whole life is. Just pausing to rejoice in them and give thanks, to wonder at the colour of fallen leaves and dawn light — even to delight in the colour of strawberry jelly made in a plastic bowl — it all helps raise the vibe.

For me, clothing is a really important part of this, because it's so up close and personal, and part of every day. I take a minute in the morning to deliberately choose my clothes for the day and lay them out on my bed, enjoying the textures and colours and how they look against my colourful blanket. And it makes me happy.

Colours — just one of many sources of joy.

Do you love colour too? Do you enjoy your clothes? Do you have a favourite colour?