S4, E2: "Advent" by Mary Jo Salter
The second episode of the new series of Poems for the Speed of Life, on the theme of Christmas.
Welcome to another episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, entrepreneur, writer and poetry advocate.
This is the second episode of a new series of the podcast, poems on the theme of Christmas. Today’s poem is "Advent" by Mary Jo Salter.
If you’d like to read along while you listen, you can find “Advent” by Mary Jo Salter
Commentary on “Advent” by Mary Jo Salter
Mary Jo Salter is an American poet (as well as lyricist, essayist and playwright), and a notable poetry editor — she has been an editor of the world-famous Norton Anthology of Poetry, and is on the editorial board of The Common, a literary magazine that aims to publish pieces of literature that embody particular times and places, both real and imagined.
This poem was included in Salter’s 2003 collection Open Shutters.
The poem shows us this beautifully intimate scene, a mother and her daughter making a gingerbread house in the run-up to Christmas. The way the crash of a falling shutter in the wind outside brings the two together in a perfect moment — “We look up, stunned—then glad to be safe and have a story”, and how the broken wall of the gingerbread house allows a peek inside at what might await within.
Beyond the magical intimacy of this small moment, there are many depths here.
Because against this quiet family scene of festive creativity, we get the symbols of what many around the world might see as one of the most important acts of creation and the creator, the birth of Jesus Christ in the stable in Bethlehem.
And against these two scenes of the creative, major and minor — the mother and child in the stable, the mother and child making the gingerbread house — we are offered the counterbalance of some moments of destruction: first, that storm wind whistling and crash of the falling shutter on the deck, and how the shock of that moment led immediately and directly to the breaking of a wall in the gingerbread house.
The title of the poem is “Advent”. Advent is that time of year where Christian churches mark the winter darkness, and await the coming of Jesus Christ, in three ways: the birth of the baby in the stable, second, the arrival of the spirit of God into the hearts and minds of those who open themselves to it; and finally, the second coming of the Lord, whenever and however that might come about.
A colleague in a group I sometimes join introduced me to a gorgeous word recently: “vernalization”.
Vernalization, stemming from the Latin vernus meaning “of the spring”, is a mechanism by which a plant's flowering process is nurtured by exposure to the prolonged cold of winter, or by an artificial equivalent.
This idea is central to Advent, that cold and dark does not just come before the warmth and the light, but is essential to it. It is not just a matter of contrasting one against the other. It is core. The darkness creates the light. And so we find a way to honour the darkness because we know that it is what creates the light.
Scripture and art seem to be two cornerstones here. The words from the Bible, inscribed in the Advent calendar that the child so carefully prises open and reads each morning during the season, and also the work of the artists who visualized these scenes and made them into pictures.
What is scripture but words, vital words? And what is art but pictures, vital pictures?
In “Advent”, Mary Jo Salter makes her own offering in words and pictures, and like all the best literature and art, it uncovers some of the universal meaning in one small moment, and makes that moment last forever.
As always, I invite you to read the poem closely, and allow its messages and meanings to come to you.
Thank you again for listening to Poems for the Speed of Life. I’ll be back soon with another poem in this series, the Christmas series, where I am trying to introduce you the listener, wherever you are in the world, to some of the writers who have masterly managed to capture things that are almost impossible to capture, the feelings of goodness and peace and love that this time of year brings to our families and our friendships and our hearts and our minds.
See you next time on Poems for the Speed of Life.
The Christmas Series
This is a poem from the Christmas poems series of Poems for the Speed of Life.
I know there are listeners and followers of this podcast all over the world. I know that there are many people here with many different religions, and many different faiths — or none — and I know that Christianity is just one.
If a series about Christmas leaves you in any way cold or distant, let me say that the goal of this series of the podcast is not to evangelize about Christianity, nor to show the benefits of one way of being or thinking or believing at the expense of all the others.
What it is, though, is my attempt to create something that captures something of the goodness of this time of year.
Because when I think of Christmas, and when I put aside all the dogmas of us-versus-them religion, and when I put aside the mass consumerism of the so-called “shopping season”, and when I really think of this time of year, of these few weeks each December, what I think, and what I feel, is captured in one or two words.
Goodness. Love.
When you’re about on the streets at this time of year — and yes, I’m probably talking about Europe, or the Americas, or the other places that might be part of so-called “Western Civilization” or the “Western Hemisphere” — there is something always good in the air. It is something that contains magic.
It is communal. It is generous. It is kind.
It is goodness.
It is love.
And maybe — for who am I to have any certainty about what is and what isn’t? — maybe it is God’s love, maybe it is the love of Christ, that comes to us and through us at this time of year.
Whatever it is, it is a love and a goodness that never — not in my experience anyway — comes fully through the giving or receiving of gifts, but arrives in the space between. In a quiet moment. In the look in a loved one’s eye or some fleeting moment on the street or at work, when something passes unsaid, something that remains unsaid because we might not have the words to say it, but is still somehow completely understood.
And so, this series of the podcast will include poems, and some other pieces of writing, that touch on this. Poems and passages of writing that actually do find the words that capture some of that wonder and magic. Some of that invisible spirit.
Some of that goodness. And some of that love.
Long-time listeners will know that I sometimes broaden my definition of what a poem is to include in Poems for the Speed of Life.
Sometimes I offer song lyrics, as in “The Best Day of My Life” by Tom Odell in Episode 30, “The West Coast of Clare” by Andy Irvine in Episode 45, and “The Living Years” by Mike Rutherford, in Episode 2 of the recent Fatherhood poems series.
I will do that again in this series, with a song written by an Irishman who said he has written dozens of — in his words — “dreadful maudlin songs”, but that this one came to him from somewhere else, some other place, some unseen but always present source of creativity.
Sometimes I offer sections of prose that, to me, carry all the power of poetry, like “Desiderata” by Max Ehrmann in Episode 165 and a passage from Vaclav Havel’s “Hope” in Episode 187.
In this series I will include, again, the long prose poem by Dylan Thomas titled “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” and the series will also feature a segment from “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens, which, no matter how good and how memorable all the various movie adaptations might be, stands above them all as a peerless work of writing. I aim to read both Dickens and Thomas every December in any case, and here I will read them for you.
I will read a newspaper editorial published in the 1890s, and I will also, of course, read poems — by an English poet laureate, by a late great Irish poet, by several Americans, dead and alive, and by others, from elsewhere around the world.
This series is for everyone.
It’s for everyone who might want or need to feel some of this goodness and some of this love, especially in our world which sometimes seems like it’s in short supply of both.
It will be for everyone who wants to give generously, and not just in material or monetary ways, but in the generosity of spirit and consciousness and goodwill that will always be useful, and cherished, by the people you come into contact with.
I look forward to bringing you the new series of Poems for the Speed of Life, on Christmas, starting with Episode 1, on Saturday, November 23rd and continuing through December 2024.
Thank you for listening. If you’re not already subscribing or following, please do so, for free, in your podcast app or in Spotify. Keep an eye on your podcasts feeds, and you’ll be hearing from me again very soon.
See you soon.
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