cultivating a sacramental consciousness during advent...

We are quickly approaching the Fourth Sunday of Advent. My spiritual tradition asks us to embrace a threefold discipline during the four weeks before Christmas by getting grounded in the practice of patience, cultivating a contemplative presence each day, and trusting the spirituality of this season, wherein the earth shares wisdom with us if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. It is a practical mysticism committed to nourishing a sacramental consciousness: a way of being that discerns both the facts of our reality and their more profound truths. Chris Webb suggests that living sacramentally means consciously acting so that "everything we do and everything we experience in the material world - the depth and breadth of our existence - is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace."  Interfaith author, Kaitlin Curtice, talks about this as "wintering" - going inward, watching, waiting, and wondering what will be revealed and experienced during the unfolding darkness - a core commitment of her Potawatomie heritage. My soul hears a parallel in Gertrud Mueller-Nelson' description of Advent spirituality:

Waiting is mysteriously necessary to all that is becoming. As in a pregnancy, nothing of value comes into being without a period of quiet incubation: not a healthy baby, not a loving relationship, not a reconciliation, a new understanding, a work of art, never a transformation. Rather, a shortened period of incubation brings forth what is not whole or strong or even alive. Brewing, baking, simmering, fermenting, ripening, germinating, and gestating are the feminine processes of becoming, and they are the symbolic states of being that belong in a life of value, necessary to transformation. (To Dance with God, p. 64)

Cultivating a sacramental consciousness has always been a challenge, all the more so in these days of perpetual engagement with our digital distractions. Nevertheless, my musical colleagues and I in Wednesday's Child believe that we can not only interrupt the tumult of our culture by offering a bit of respite in what we call our Blue Christmas/Longest Night liturgy, but also share tools for unplugging, too. I have partnered with these gifted and faithful musicians for over 15 years of music-making, gift-bearing, consciousness-raising, and soul-sharing. We create in pursuit of faith, hope, and love. In doing so, we have become a small but eclectic collective that spans different ages, backgrounds, genders, spirituality, family, aesthetics, and perspectives. A small faith community nourished by song, striving to integrate each person's unique gifts, quirks, and blessings into the whole. As we've been preparing our 2025 take on the Longest Night (December 21) through music, song, silence, poetry, candlelight, and presence, I've heard a sacred invitation to learn from the darkness.

Darkness scares us. Darkness can feel like a nightmare. We’ve been taught to fear it, to avoid it, to keep the lights on, to think happy thoughts, to pretend everything’s all right, and to not go into “that dark place.” Yet because God created both light and dark, day and night, and called ALL of creation good, we are invited to learn to see in the dark. It is, to be sure, an acquired art, without which we will miss what is there. Barbara Brown Taylor, put it like this in her book, Learning to Walk in the Dark: "I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light....new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark."

After collecting the songs and poems that resonated with us this year, three discrete yet interrelated challenges surfaced. One recognized the fullness of our respective schedules: it hasn't been easy to ensure the whole band is consistently together for rehearsals. Because we deconstruct songs before refashioning them, having folk away slowed the simmering process of creativity down considerably. There are a ton of reasons why this has been so, and there's no blame; it's just the luck of the draw that's made this year more complicated.

A second challenge involved new material and genres: the core of this year's liturgy is built on seven songs from Gen X and Millennial culture, which is a big shift for some of us old timers. It's been exciting, but also required a longer learning curve to make the art of Alanis Morrissette, NIN, REM, David Bowie, and others work within our groove. Which points to wrinkle number three: how to close this gig?  After finding a path through the first two challenges, we came to a strategic and aesthetic fork in the road. After tossing away a few good but as yet unformed songs, there was no consensus about how to bring it all home.

At first, this was vexing to me: with only a few days before it was time to stand and deliver, I was yearning for clarity, and it wasn't coming. Further, my heart genuinely wanted us ALL to weigh in and clarify how we thought it best to wrap things up, but we had to do this virtually. Would that we had a few more weeks to meet, talk, and rework some tunes in person, but we'd already used all the available time. So, after probably too many IMs and emails, we agreed to trust simplicity and see how that shakes out. My point in recounting these challenges is that creating art and worship in community is an existential act of practicing sacramental consciousness. We were listening to what the heart wanted us to know. What were likewise searching through the wisdom of our flesh, too, even while discerning how the whole presentation fit together intellectually. Aesthetics, culture, liturgy, and experience mashed together with reality, trust, love, confusion, and our mission to create a safe space for contemplation. I won't speak for others, but this strikes me as a growing edge for the band. Tricia Gates Brown wrote in her Substack column:

Listening, singing, and sharing music in a certain heart-wide-and-open way has become for us closest thing to prayer we know. And it’s not that listening leads me to pray or puts me in a mind for prayer and we become so filled with love/empathy/awe for my fellow creatures and life itself, that we feel deeply in touch with the divine.

Creating and sharing sacramental consciousness music in cooperative solidarity is transformative. It is not always easy and never simple, but rich, rewarding, and blessed in ways I could never have imagined. Come join us this Sunday in Palmer, MA @ 4 pm.