In the Bleak Midwinter

Advent is often a dark time. Of course, Michigan, where I live and where the days are brutally short and it is overcast for much of the late fall and winter, rendering sunlight at a premium, that is literally true. But it is also a dark time spiritually, psychologically, poetically. I have always noticed this, not so much in the way of introspection and anticipation for the birth of Christ, but as a world phenomenon, a metaphysical reality. Often world events attest to this, whether by way of natural disasters or the even more intransigent, and seemingly unavoidable, man-made disasters such as war or politics. In a way not unlike that of the classic television special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Kenneth Branagh captures this mood perfectly—and, surprisingly, comically—in his 1995 film In the Bleak Midwinter (known to American audiences as A Midwinter’s Tale).

At the very beginning of the film we meet Joe (played by Michael Maloney), a passionate yet tremendously underemployed actor who wants to put on a production of Hamlet during the yuletide. He explains his psychological state moving into this project.

“It was late November (I think), and I was thinking about the whole Christmas thing: the birth of Christ, The Wizard of Oz, family murders. And, quite frankly, I was depressed. You know, I always wanted to live my life, like, in an old movie, a sort of fairy tale, you know? Mind you, I suppose, a lot of fairy tales turn out to be nightmares, a lot of old movies are crap—well, that’s what I did. You see, the thing was, um…. Well, you know the way doctors say that nervous breakdowns can happen very fast and dramatically, sort of big bang? Or there are the other kind, which happen very slowly over a period of time. Well, I was thirty-three years old, and this one had started when I was seven months and it had just begun to get a grip.”

Advent is always such a time, and this year, for me at least, it’s been even darker. There are, of course, the geopolitical threats of an encroaching totalitarianism—which seems to be metastasizing in the Western “democracies” to a shocking degree. Justin Trudeau may be the most loathsome of this ilk with his authoritarian proclivities and penchant for “assisted” suicide (“coerced” is a better adjective), but he has many competitors in his quest for most Herodian of the Herodians.

This week in Canada: “I don’t want to go on the cart.”

But there are also the more personal infections of darkness. In one week this November, for example, my bank account was hacked, I found myself in a property line dispute with my only neighbor which included a visit from the sheriff, our two vehicles required necessary repairs to the tune of $3000, and my mother, who had lived with me for the past seven years, at last succumbed to the vascular dementia with which she had been afflicted for nearly a decade. This, of course, followed three years of societal insanity that has damaged the psyches of many of our loved ones, mine included, in ways that, I think, we are still not quite ready to admit.

Often when we experience these kinds of stressors, they can trigger dormant traumas and such was the case with me. Without going too far into it, I have revisited the suicide of a childhood friend and later girlfriend named Lisa from when I was eighteen and the suicide of my uncle Kevin, a sensitive artist and musician, more like an older brother, who taught me how to play guitar and who abandoned this veil of tears when he was forty-four during an Advent twenty-seven years ago. One never gets over these kinds of events. The wound never completely heals.

A song that often returns to me at this season is Dougie Maclean’s “Turning Away,” a tune about the incremental loss of Scottish indigeneity through globalization and modernity. Its refrain says it all:

In darkness we do what we can In daylight we’re oblivion Our hearts so raw and clear Are turning away, turning away from here

The comfort the song gives me is not one of resolution, but of recognition of the fallenness of Things; and perhaps this is one of the most important messages of Advent.

Here’s a beautiful version of the song by Dougie with Kathy Mattea and the wizardry of Jerry Douglas on dobro among the contributions of other great players.

The title of Branagh’s film, as many will have noticed, is taken from Christian Rossetti’s exquisite Christmas poem of the same name which was first published in 1872. In 1905, British composer Gustav Holst set the poem to music and it is in this form that it is most widely recognized. Rossetti’s lyric encapsulates both the melancholy of the Advent mood and the anticipation of a glory to come. It speaks particularly to our own times, as it does to all times.

A lovely version of the hymn by Angelo Kelly & Family

The traditional epistle reading for the fourth Sunday in Advent in the Roman Church, as in the Anglican, emphasizes our contention with darkness in anticipation of the birth of the Light:

“Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise of God.” (1 Corinthians 4)

This melancholia that has so infected me as of late has brought to mind another such period of sorrow and depression when I was twenty-one. Then, a young musician and songwriter, I felt directionless, out of hope. It was a time when I found, in the words of John Donne, “all coherence gone.” Nothing made sense. Somehow, though, I was able to write my one and only Christmas song, a mashup between Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 16 in C major and The Rolling Stones’ “Get Off My Cloud”—and it is far from afflicted with melancholia. In fact, it’s downright chipper. And here it is in a version I recorded live with the Corktown Popes eight years ago:

So, I guess this is my Christmas greeting to all of you, friends known and unknown, from here in the wilderness. And we are all of us in the wilderness.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: Flesh & Spirit. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

The Dutch Farmers v. the Technocrats / Sophia v. Ahriman

Back in February I published a blogpost entitled “The Canadian Peasants’ Revolt” about the Canadian trucker convoy and their protest in Ottawa (amongst other places) in the Great White North. What has happened in Canada is indeed stunning as well as heartbreaking. Popular podcaster Joe Rogan recently called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “f*cking dictator” and he is not incorrect. What’s going on behind the Maple Curtain is mind-blowing—and Tamara Lich is still in jail on trumped up charges. O Canada.

While the truckers’ protest may have ended for a time, their spirit has not been extinguished. Recently, for example, Dutch farmers have been protesting draconian climate gerrymandering of their government that seeks to close farms and seize property. They’ve brought tractors to the protest instead of the traditional pitchforks, but you get the idea. In one instance at least, they planted a Canadian flag in the center of a town to symbolize their solidarity with and inspiration of the Canadian truckers. The farmers are not having it and have closed down borders and city centers throughout their country. It really goes without saying that Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, like his Canadian counterpart Trudeau (not to mention New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern and many others) is a protégé of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, whose primary funder is Bill Gates. I guess yesterday’s conspiracy theory is today’s political reality. But it doesn’t need to stay that way. It won’t.

What has really struck me in the images coming out of The Netherlands of the protest is the symbolic nature of the farmers in opposition to the technocracy. In my book Transfiguration and elsewhere I have described this as the battle between Sophia and Ahriman, not that Sophia is a warrior (that is actually St. Michael the Archangel’s job—and I encourage you to invoke his protection in these evil times). The farmers, people connected to the land and the seasons, represent Sophia and the technocrats who seek to destroy them represent Ahriman. I don’t want to stretch the analogy too far, but, as with the Canadian truckers, this is a protest with a long pedigree going back to the enclosure riots of the 16th and 17th centuries—a protest of the common man against the machinations of the elites. And, at root, this is a spiritual battle. The spirit of Gerrard Winstanley, both prophet and journeyman, overshadows these protests—which have now spread to Germany, Italy, Canada (again) and other places and will within short order, I think, arrive in the United States. In fact, a worldwide protest is planned for July 23rd:

Winstanley’s words from A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England (1649) are just as poignant now as when he wrote them:

“The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land.”

That is, what the Dutch government and their counterparts in other countries and the WEF are after is a new form of enclosure. It’s the same old game, what E.P. Thompson described as “a plain enough case of highway robbery, played according to fair rules of property and law laid down by a Parliament of property-owners and lawyers.” And need I remind anyone that Bill Gates has been sucking up farmland like a drunkard at last call? I sincerely hope it is last call for him and his breed.

I have not yet mentioned Sri Lanka, which has fallen into chaos, causing the country’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign. Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas has also just resigned, and this follows upon the resignation announcements of Italian PM Mario Draghi and British PM Boris Johnson, not to mention the assassination of former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe. Maybe these things are related, maybe they’re not. But I am certainly watching. As should we all be.

These are dangerous times. Recently, one of my oldest and dearest friends came to me in tears about the status of the world, telling me that she only wants for me and my children and grandchild to be safe. I want us all to be safe, but we’re up against a profound (and profoundly organized) kind of evil.

Unfortunately, what we’re seeing play out now on the world stage is something I saw coming years ago, though I must admit it has arrived much earlier than I thought it would. In Transfiguration, I end with the following warning, which seems now even more pressing than when I published it:

“But there must be a place for human agency in this eschatology: free will demands as much. As Berdyaev prophesied, “Either a new epoch in Christianity is in store for us and a Christian renaissance will take place, or Christianity is doomed to perish—although this cannot for a moment be admitted, since we know that ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’” Christians all too often operate under the assumption that God will show up in the nick of time in order to save us from ultimate catastrophe; but world history, especially that of the twentieth century, begs to differ (a point that Death of God theology brought to our embarrassed attention). Likewise with the enveloping darkness of the technological colonization of the human person: don’t for a second think that God will prevent us from letting this happen to ourselves. It’s already happening. We’re letting it happen.

“Sophia awakens only when we awaken to her. And this is the task of Christians in this age: to awaken ourselves and those who dwell upon this earth with us to the sophianic reality of Creation. We can choose to do nothing. We can simply let things progress and see how it ends. But, whatever the case, Christians need to own their complicity in creating the world in which we now live. We did this. To hide behind the bulwark of a reactionary fear, hoping to raise the glory of Christendom once again from its ashes, or to reduce the Christian mystery to a palliative social program or variation on the group-therapy model: these are missions for fools. In Berdyaev’s damning assessment:

‘The world is living in a period of agony which greatly resembles that of the end of antiquity. But the present situation is more hopeless, since at the close of antiquity Christianity entered the world as a new young force, while now Christianity, in its human age, is old and burdened with a long history in which Christians have often sinned and betrayed their ideal. And we shall see that the judgment upon history is also a judgment upon Christianity in history.’

“There is no place to which to retreat. Nothing to preserve. Nothing to restore. There is only the future, the eschaton, the parousia which is always/already here. Let us embrace it.”

Be not afraid.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine. Twitter: @Sophiologist_