Advent 29

Sunday, Christmas Day
25 December 2022
 
This will be my first Christmas in the Quaker tradition.

For any readers not familiar, the Quakers are still around and they are still absolutely with it. They started up hundreds of years ago (I am not a Quaker historian) with their unique silent worship services, with everyone in one large pulpit-less room, waiting for God or the Holy Spirit, or in today’s terms, basically whatever it is that you are listening for/who you are listening to. When someone in the meeting (meeting=congregation for my fellow Protestant-ish folk) feels they have something to share, they stand up, share their thought, and sit back down. And the room becomes silent once again.

I had attended a few events in the Hamilton chapel that pertained to Quakerism, and I knew it was something I wanted to check out if I ever landed in a place with a Quaker presence. And then I moved to Boston to live with total strangers and start a job that actually went fully remote on my second day on board, so I thought, “Hey, this might be a great time to reach out and find some community!” So I went to the non-Quaker worship center that I have known all my life aka Protestant church.

In trying out hip, cool progressive congregations in the Boston area and jumping into the introvert deep end by attending young adult church groups, I found the same feeling that I had for several years inside of a church. I didn’t have a name for it before, in feeling overcome with a sense of helplessness and smallness when going to service in the church I had grown up in, going to the churches around Hamilton, but now I recognized it as grief. 

There is so much to be said about the church today and I know almost nothing in that vein, nothing in theology or global Christian politics or anything like that. I publish kids’ books for a living. But I know that, for me, church had become less of a place to go to learn how to be a better member of your community and think about the ways you might cause harm, or more importantly, the ways that you create and receive joy. It felt like going to church was an unending cycle of Who is going to run the projector? And who will take collection? How will we afford to fix the sidewalk or the door or the elevator? Church-hopping around Clinton and Utica, similar questions came up, as they must in keeping a tradition alive, What fundraisers can we hold? Will anyone volunteer to take over the outreach committee? Will anyone volunteer to bring a dish to the funeral this Tuesday? I know I am a green 23-year-old with a lot to learn about faith, but I felt more like I was at church for religion, instead of faith.

Maybe they sound the same, but what I mean is that I needed to find a place to be still. Selah.

I was listening to the Glennon Doyle audiobook earlier this year (highly recommend if you are a fan of the US Women’s National soccer team or if you are literally anyone at all), and she landed on the Hebrew expression that appears only in Psalms: selah. It probably means to pause in a musical sense, and be still more literally, but it’s interpreted by some to mean a spiritual stillness as well. It is so incredibly vital for my homeostasis, as we try to keep everything in the world from burning to a total and utter crisp, that I have a place and a people that are all, for a moment every Sunday, still. 

The Quakers’ whole deal is that the light of God is in each person, and you can take that to mean whatever it seems to mean to your heart and mind. At the Cambridge Meeting of Friends (Friends=congregation members) that I attend, we come together to be, in a sense, in each others’ light for one hour every week, sometimes punctuated with a shared thought or a few, and other times completely silent for the entire meeting. But the message is always along the lines of really radical and challenging love. I won’t share others’ messages here, but I will say I have never been evangelical in the slightest fiber of my being, but I weirdly am inviting everyone I know to Quaker meeting, and very very weirdly, people are excited to take me up on it. 

It’s an hour of silence. You listen for whoever or whatever you think might be coming to you, and you share the silence with everyone else in the room who is taking the same time to do the same thing, and really listen as I think many of us seldom do in a typical week, let alone a week in December. An hour is long, and there often comes a point when I think I’ve thought all the thoughts I wanted to think and I’m like, “Okay we have got to be like almost through the hour right?” Then actually, I find the best stillness, that’s most restorative, most nourishing, most productive, maybe even clearest, comes right after I ask are we done yet. It’s uncomfortable to sit still and silent for an hour, not picking up my phone once (only because I left it in the car), not absent-mindedly singing an earworm from the new Taylor Swift album, not making the fifth cup of tea of the day to avoid work, but it’s also kind of the best. Selah. It is so hard to be still, but we have been preparing for 25 days, and I feel for the first time in a while, that I realized in real time the arrival of Advent, the nearing of Christmas Eve, and ultimately, the arrival of Christmas day and the celebration of radical love that it means.

At this point, I’ve spent I don’t know how many hours in silence with the Friends in Cambridge, and I’ve had stillness in which I can notice time passing. It is Christmas. We are celebrating Christ. I was at the meeting house for a memorial service on this year’s Transgender Day of Remembrance, and I had one of the clearest faith moments in my life in hearing from myself or whoever helped me get here. “Christ would be here.” There is so much to be said for the ongoing violence against trans and gender-nonconforming people here and around the world, but for this space, I will just say that I am absolutely positive Christ would be at a service to hold in the light those we have lost. There is plenty that I doubt in conflict with the capital C capital D Christian Doctrine, but this was a moment in a service for the first time in many years when I had certainty and rather than religion, it was a moment of faith. Christ would be here.

There are many whys for the ways we shape our Christmas celebrations, and I have been thinking on that through the days of Advent. This year, my reason is that the person who we know as Jesus was one who felt still moments. I am taking time to be still. Selah. Listen. I don’t know who or what I’ll hear or when or why, but I won’t even hear the thing if I’m going a hundred miles an hour. 

So I am, 100mph, through the mean streets of Brighton, Mass, save for an hour with the Quakers, in stillness, in the light. Selah. 

Avery Cook ’21