Holy Waiting: Field Notes on Advent
“Once a year, each Christmas, for a few days at least, we and millions of our neighbors turn aside from our preoccupations with life reduced to biology or economics or psychology and join together in a community of wonder. The wonder keeps us open-eyed, expectant, alive to life that is always more than we can account for, that always exceeds our expectations, that is always beyond anything we can make.”
Beloveds, I am thinking about advent.
What this season means to me now
How our waiting for the light we need -
The light we’re calling in —
Whatever form that takes for us right now —
How the waiting changes us.
The waiting, the holding space for,
The longing and anticipation
prepares us,
expands us,
shapes us to be able
to hold it.
The space between a vision, a prayer
and its arrival
is holy space.
In the first episode of the ALTER podcast I mentioned that in my early 20’s, I went to seminary, which also known as divinity school—what a name, huh?—a graduate school for students training to be pastors or priests. In short, spiritual leaders. I did a couple masters degrees - one In philosophy of religion and one in theology. I was one of only a few women in the programs, probably less than 10% of a very male culture, and in this case, pretty toxically masculine. It wasn’t a place that actually valued feminine voices in leadership.
I knew I was called to spiritual leadership. And I sensed in some vague way that would take a different form that I had seen growing up.
My spiritual horizons at the time weren’t wide enough to know that there are quite a few incredible progressive divinity schools that value and champion voices the church has historically marginalized or condemned. Unsurprisingly, these schools also celebrate the arts and creativity in general, because those on the margins, those who see things differently than the mainstream can often express a fresh perspective that brings new light on our understanding of spirit, god, the luminous and numinous.
For the last 20 years, I’ve been asking the question of what my relationship is to the church that has been a source of wonder and arrogance, and healing and corruption, and forgiveness and judgmental superiority, and belonging and exclusion, and wisdom and closed-minded certainty.
And I have found so much expected joy and a sense of collaboration with Spirit, creating and leading from outside, from the sidelines. And discovering voices, and luminaries, and accounts of encounters with Spirit I hadn’t heard before. All these versions of god, of goddess, all these languages.
I would say the deepest message of the gospel is that there’s really no such thing as outside—but that’s another blog post.
More good news is that there’s a revolution underway in religious communities around the world—in churches and temples and mosques—as marginalized voices are creating their own platforms, telling previously suppressed stories, and asking questions they weren’t allowed to ask. So much light is breaking in. So much empathy, compassion, and repentance—that old word that means a changing of the mind—is flooding through.
There’s a new world coming.
Around Christmas-time I feel an ache, I feel all these questions bubble up as I remember the ceremonies around this high point of the year.
It’s like I’ve entered a sacred cave filled with candles and incense. The altar at its center has been taken away, the gathering of devotees has left, but there’s a whiff of the divine. There’s a longing to worship.
I’m sharing this story because I have a feeling many of you are also in the midst of a spiritual evolution, deconstruction, reorientation that brings you a mix of liberation and longing, expansion and nostalgia. A kind of homesickness for a home that no longer exists, a community that you love and have also outgrown.
An in-between-ness.
If you’re feeling this way, I’d really love to connect with you and hear your story. Send me a direct message on social media or in the comments below. I want to create community for spiritual wander-ers.
The word advent means the arrival of a notable person, thing, or event
It comes from the Latin adventus ‘arrival’
In the Christian tradition, Advent is the season leading up to Christmas
Technically, the 4 Sundays before Christmas
It’s often observed by fasting, and a sense of solemnity or even grief, a groaning, acknowledging the hunger of waiting for what we need
I can’t help but notice the echo of advent in adventure. The adventure of advent. The season of the unexpected.
The great fantasy write Madeline L’engle wrote a little poem about it:
“This is the irrational season
when love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
there’d have been no room for the child”
The Irrational Season.
The season to leave room for wonder.
To hold space for light to break through.
I love that advent is a season of 4 weeks building up to the single day of Christmas.
Because the waiting changes us.
The anticipation, the holding space, the calling in changes us.
It’s no surprise human babies take 9 months to be formed. In part, because when a mother gives birth two new people are born. She is birthing a baby, and she is birthing herself as a mother. And it takes a good 9 months to prepare, to be shaped by the space you’re holding, to become ready for it.
What is the light you are calling into your life?
A transformational force of healing?
Something beyond you. It may very well be within you, but something you’re calling in.
What if you decided the waiting is holy?
The space in between is sacred?
The space in between the desire and the arrival is what prepares you for it?
What if you can commune with the soul of who, of what you’re calling in, before it arrives?What if in meditation, in prayer, you can align with it, rise to its frequency?
What if you imagine that prayer or meditation as the decoration you might do to your home in anticipation of a coming holiday? A time to prepare for and celebrate what’s coming.
What if you take this season as a time of holy waiting for the light you’re calling in, of making a practice of hope?
I love Krista Tippet’s definition of Hope in her beautiful book Becoming Wise: An Inquiry in to the Mystery and Art of Living”:
“Hope I define hope as distinct from optimism or idealism. It has nothing to do with wishing. It references reality at every turn and reveres truth. It lives open eyed and wholeheartedly with the darkness that is woven ineluctably into the light of life and sometimes seems to overcome it. Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a habit, that becomes spiritual muscle memory. It’s a renewable resource for moving through life as it is, not as we wish it to be.”
So, what light do you need?
What gift?
What light can you be?
What gift can you be?
I am putting the finishing touches on an upcoming offering that will lead us into creating the year of our dreams next year. The year of our greatest growth and creativity. An initiation into spiritual leadership. You can join the announcement wait list at nicolemeline.com/visionary. I can’t wait to share it with you. And I love this preface, this prefatory time as a space to ask:
Who do I want to become next year?
What is most essential to create?
How might the light break in?
For now, I’d love to share two tools I’ve created as bridges into next year:
The Integrate Journal and Envision Planner
Integrate is a gorgeous Year in Review journal to lead you through integrating this past year—all its gifts and lessons and realizations and releases. To alchemize this past year into wisdom. It is a perfect gift for anyone—a child or an adult—you would love to have a meaningful, deep conversation with, or to offer them a process for quiet reflection. I love the idea of the Integrate journal as a placesetting for every guest at your table at a holiday gathering, for a rich conversation around the table.
And the Envision Planner leads you forward. Heartward, to a new year. Crystalizing your priorities, refining your manifesto as you begin a daily journey of manifesting. Both are waiting for you at shop.nicolemeline.com
I would also love to invite you to join me in the Alter Together Membership for luminous movement practices and meditations. I will be offering some special sacred holiday practices to infuse this season with magic. Join at nicolemeline.com/alter
I would love to hear what holiday traditions nourish your soul this season in the comments below. My playlist Sacred Holiday is on repeat. I’m wishing you ethereal mornings in wafts of incense and sacred music.
My loves, wishing you a beautiful, illuminating season of advent, whatever holiday you are anticipating.
And transformational, holy waiting.
With love,
Nicole
