Vigil: a period of keeping awake during time usually spent in sleep, a night-watch, often spent in prayer; taking place the eve before a holy day in the Christian church. A time of waiting. (Wikapedia)
This Christmas Eve morning, it is 44 degrees and raining with purpose. My handy weather warning talks about a flood watch. Hank made it six steps onto the porch before deciding he didn’t need to pee and heading back in to his warm bed. But from my vantage point on the sofa underneath the Christmas tree, the lights in the darkness are comforting, and the aroma of French Roast sharp and pungent.
We drove around last night to see the Christmas lights. I couldn’t remember when I had last been out and about after dark — maybe nine months or more. As always, the lights were very beautiful, and their symbolism of lighting the way for something sacred and mysterious to be born within us reassuring. But interestingly enough, I experienced something akin to what it is like when I remove my hearing aides and sounds become gentled and muffled, softer, with less of an imperative to be fully present — the sights were like that last night, softer, muffled, shadowed somehow . . . perhaps because there is another presence about in the collective this year, muffling the light. Or at least in me . . .
Today we will eat fish. I think I’ve described elsewhere in these pages. that my mother was one who never met a superstition or religious custom she didn’t like, many of which were throwbacks to what she called the Old Country. She was definitely one to cover her bases in terms of honoring the powers-that-be, so our growing up was an experience ranging from half-wild paganism to traditional conservative “shoulds and oughts,” which delighted me, but dismayed my more down to earth sister. All of which is to say that we always had seafood on Christmas Eve, usually oysters, plentiful and cheap in those days, to honor the Feast of the Seven Fishes customs, I reckon (look it up on Wikapedia!), although we had never heard of it. At any rate, I am not one to mess about with offending powers-that-be, either, so baked cod it will be, since oysters seem far away.
My spiritual tradition is not Catholic, but in attending church with my Cajun Catholic husband, my favorite service would be the Christmas Eve vigil, when the darkened church would be hushed and safe, but deeply mysterious — amidst candlelight and poinsettias and old incense, the sense of ‘waiting’ was palpable . . .
Weather. Lights in the darkness. Fish. A vigil. A time of waiting. The unknown . . .
(An interesting aside — my ‘weather alert’ just flashed on the computer screen, “wild two days ahead.”)
It is not a time of ‘Knowing” now. The Light is not crystal clear, piercing the darkness. The weather, the rain, the natural world (perhaps read ‘viruses’ here), determinedly makes itself known and shapes our individual and collective behavior if we move in rhythm with it. It does not seem like a time to force thinking into either/or splits, to pretend we know when we don’t, to be dogmatic in our thinking.
Keep a vigil. Wait, pray. Eat fish, whatever that may symbolically mean to you, to honor the sacred, the Mystery, the natural world. And may it be an active waiting for you, with your only Knowing the assurance that there IS something . . . And in that Knowing may there be peace and reassurance.
Christmas Eve. We wait for Santa. For the Christ Child. For the Light. For Something . . .