I begin November with a simple purchase of five taper candles, to prepare for the upcoming Advent season. For someone who identifies as an empath, it can be extremely difficult to not feel as if it’s Advent all throughout the year, rather than a specific season filled with longing and sorrow before massive celebration. In other words, as I have given myself the title as I am drawn to lament, or as my therapist calls it, drawn to disgust, you can catch me at almost any time feeling some sort of sadness in looking at the state of things; emphasis on the word things being as wide and vast as the noun can encapsulate.
Yet, the candles themselves are named after particular “happy” affectual virtues: hope, faith, joy, and peace. To light them, a symbolism of seeking these virtues out, or rather, to acknowledge their abundant availability in a proverbially lacking world, is quite a tension. For me, the tension builds, as I do not want to feel what seems impossible, even wrong, when so much is in need of rebuilding. Embodying more of the lament, the introspection, and the potential for penance is much more appealing.
And yet, this is the challenge as found in Advent: what does it look like to hold two seemingly opposing emotions in your open hands?
A book has been lingering with me in considering not only biblical texts with troubling content, but also, in applying it to our current context. Rhiannon Graybill writes Texts After Terror, specifically on rape and sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible, providing new avenues to view these “yucky” texts. She argues for a reorientation in reception of these texts, but in interpretation, first argues to “refuse to claim a position of innocence.” In this, she quotes feminist theorist Donna Haraway, to propel us to “stay with the trouble,” opening us up to ambiguity and complexity, holding space “for ambivalence, ambiguity and unknowing, even when we wish for clarity and closure.” While simplifying her argument in her book (and hopefully not misrepresenting), there is this essence of allowing for more imagination of what could come after the trouble as well. This doesn’t erase the trouble, but grants more space, as Sara Ahmed says, to breathe.
In then, allowing for imaginative possibilities in my own life, in the current world, within the justice system in the United States, and the list goes on and on--moving after from what simply is--there is space that had been previously closed up in order to breathe and dream of radicality. It allows for more. There’s no mistake that one of the key growth areas that many abolitionists point to for those squirming around attempting change is encouraging the curiosity to grow into imagination. There is certainly risk here, and it is worth taking, but surely uncomfortable.
I write this in the wake of a “not-guilty” Kyle Rittenhouse, as I mourn the state of white supremacist necropolitics functioning as created. I write this as white rage brings what was seeming visual progress two steps backwards, revealing the shallowness of previous commitments to change. And while neither of these were too surprising, they still hurt. In the middle of the hurt, it is difficult to imagine something else, an after. And yet, we must.
I write this swimming in the emails of cancelled plans, ourselves saddened by the lack of ritual to close a chapter fully, to even reclaim what was a difficult trip, as my PhD program bookends were both submerged in pandemic pandemonium. We eat gifted monkey bread and struggle to find any of these virtues as a candle calls to be aflame today. To acknowledge the hurt and to struggle while in the practices of more does not take away from the pain, but to allow for open arms that can hold all of it, in whatever fluid states they are found, and to let them be as such. From here is a foundation, space, potential, even.
So the silly candles have become, for me, a practice of radical imagination. What does it mean to imagine and practice hope, faith, joy, and peace, in a world that only wants those things for a certain demographic? What does it look like to make that space in my own individual life, and my own community? Resisting the colonizing tendency innate within me also means that this refusal to claim a position of innocence that Graybill purports, demands I also do the work and follow those who have been doing so; and speaks directly to a repentance that longs, so prevalent in the season of Advent.
May we imagine together such a radical after, a radical future, as a subversive, even queer practice in lighting the candles this Advent season.