Advent as Intervening Presence – For My Sister

 

A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes…and is dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent. ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In a distant city I flirt with the street and the street responds. I frame my infatuation with experiencing various artificial states of consciousness, as freedom.

In this stretch of time I so dedicate myself to the singular apprenticeship of enhanced perception, that it becomes, as you might imagine, a personal road to dissolution.

I sit at midday under a black sky, involuntarily grinding my teeth, twisting in paranoia as though lynched in a gale. Sleep finally comes, and through the intimacy with a driftwood-strewn beach, some equilibrium.

All the while I carry a kind of mortification that finds me avoiding all contact.

One day, gathering my reserves, I walk to the post office. The terrazzo floor is hard-waxed and gleaming, the marble counters are buffed to a high gloss, and a coastal sun is bending through lancet windows.

Along a velvet rope, held between chrome stanchions, a line—the shuffling feet of polite impatience. In between shifting weight and weather-talk, people lick stamps, seal envelopes—faint glaze of glue at the back of throats.

I clutch my unemployment verification card and step to the end of the row. People inch away. I am stone-torn, salt-caked, smoke-rinsed, and tide-pool groomed.

And now I see her profile, her face, flowering toward the sunlit windows, soft creases at her neck, black hair straight, shining, falling past her shoulders, her left hand holding a postcard, and the quiet of her bearing softening all the hard glaring edges.

My eldest sister—radiant. Years fall away and I move toward her. Then stop. Some cloud. Some heavy shadow.

The air is a thick impassable wall. My errand forgotten, I turn and hurry away. Her image follows me. The scene incised forever.

My dark night of disconnection becomes darker; but the dark does not overcome the lingering light of my sister’s image.

I never knew if her postcard was intended for my last abandoned address or was destined back home to the prairies. It didn’t matter.

I only knew that if I could have shaken off my shame and approached her that day, there would have been no judgement—only joy in reunion.

That night, I again fall asleep to the sound of the Pacific, but my sorrow and shame is mixed with a kind of mad hope.

Everything seems lifted, freed a little, by the arrival of a joyful presence, in the form of my sister; a presence, I see now, that has never been too far.

There are moments in life that act like a hinge—a door, some deeper reality, some loving power, opens from the outside, and you step out, rub your eyes, and take a step.