When I think about the weeks preceding Christmas, I feel a swell of gratitude for the years I spent in wilderness monasteries, keeping still in Advent starlight or bundling up in Nova Scotia to venture out into the silent moonlit snow to walk beneath towering white pines and bare-limbed birches and maples. I listened for owls and the thunderbolt cracks that raced across the expanding ice on South Carrying Road Lake.
And I recall a ten-day retreat at St. John of the Cross Hermitage, poised on a steep west-facing slope of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in southern Colorado. Looking westward through the floor-to-ceiling window beside the little wood-burning stove, the 120-square-foot hut felt like a hot-air balloon’s gondola suspended over the east side of the vast San Luis valley.
It looked like this to me as a young monk:
In the highlands, clouds kiss
The cold cliffs.
Appearing, disappearing,
Stone and mist, razor ridge
And edgeless white ephemera
Touch.
Muffled, the groaning stone
Is hushed.
Only the creek speaks
And the syllable never ends.
Venting Gratitude
This year I dubbed the Thursday before Advent “Thanksventing.” Americans are venting a lot of anger lately. A lot I don’t understand. A lot looks justified: anger at the level of poverty and paucity of health care in this wealthy nation. Anger at our proud bigotry. But I’m venting gratitude lately. It feels like healthy ventilation, warm and kind in a cold winter. Thanksventing en route to Adventing.
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I am “venting” thanks to you for these reflections on Thanksgiving and Advent. I love the poem from “when you were a young monk”. What a continuity from then to now, urban hermit.
And I am venting thankfulness for your beautiful soul and how it expresses itself in poetry and prose. Your words touch my heart as we prepare to enter the stillness of Advent.
Ah, Fr. Dave, how I envy your memories of starlit Advent nights! And I love your “thanksventing” idea. I was once criticized for saying thank you too much so I am keenly aware of how easily words can be over-used and rendered meaningless. Yet, I also remain uplifted to hear someone say a simple, heartfelt “thanks.” Maybe that’s the crux of Advent–to cultivate a deep sense of gratitude and express it without restraint. THANK YOU!