Meditations During Advent: Becoming The Monastery

As a social worker, one of my mentors, was a Buddhist man. He sometimes spoke of his meditation practice. I asked him once: What is it like, meditating? He said: It’s very noisy.

When I can peel back from the loud, insanity of the Christmas season as it is marketed to us, I appreciate the quiet, contemplative heart of Advent the church offers. Advent is meant to be a contemplative season in which we find ourselves called to awaken. The soul that has fallen asleep is roused. The lectionary on Sunday implored the listener to wake up: 

Romans: You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. 
The Gospel of Matthew: Keep awake for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. 

It is curious that our religion chooses the darkest, sleepiest time of the year to call us to awaken—surely the spring make more sense, when the earth is waking up from the winter and the days are growing longer, except that the awakening we are called to is within the inner regions of us. The short days turns us inside. Advent is set apart as an opportunity to make contact with the inner world.

Recently in our Bible+ study, someone recalled the story of Persephone—Hades, in love with Persephone, doesn’t believe she would follow him into the underworld, so he steals her and forces her into a deep crack in the earth. Persephone wanted to stay on the surface. Zeus eventually intervenes and insists that Persephone be allowed to return to the world, which she does—and upon her arrival the world burst forth in fruit and flowers. She does not have to remain in the underworld forever, but the very interesting thing about Persephone’s experience of that interior space in the earth is that, of her own will and volition, she returns to it. She is awake to something important in the inner regions. She needs something that exists for her in that region. 

It's fascinating that our pupils know to open wider in low light—the dark spaces actually force a capacity in us to see more. The dark, inner regions in most traditions are not associated with fear or evil – but with fertility. The underworld not as a hell but a womb. The inner regions of the season of Advent are forming something holy in us and we are invited in.

 

Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield says when we take the seat on our cushion for meditation, we become our own monastery. This is the time it is: time to sit, to close our eyes, to stay awake, in spite of the noise.

 

- The Rev. Judith Whelchel