Longing for the Tribe

 

Photo from the Website of Red Pepper Spectacle Arts

 

For twenty-three years, no matter the weather, a proudly and joyfully rough-edged parade has snaked through Kensington Market in downtown Toronto on the night of the Winter Solstice.  Giant ravens  glide along the street. Iroquois shadow puppets tell the story of a miraculous birth. A contingent of Italian kitchen witches shrieks renditions of "Return to Sorrento" and "That's Amore." One year, a contingent in raccoon suits frolicked on the roof of a parking garage overturning garbage cans. 

Such apparently chaotic magic takes planning: it doesn't happen on its own. For the last ten years,  Red Pepper Spectacle Arts, a not-for-profit, artist-run collective has coordinated the parade our of their storefront community studio in the heart of the Market: http://www.redpepperspectaclearts.org/.  The Festival has always thrived on a model of leadership that blurs the line between spectators and participants. Handmade lanterns, many created in the open workshop Red Pepper hosts the week before the parade, float above the random crowd as we fall in behind the firebreathers, the stilt-walkers, the ten-foot street puppets, the drummers.

The Kensington Market Festival of Lights embodies much of what's most precious about this extraordinary city that mothers us all. There's room in the parade for every cultural tradition people choose to bring to it--and room for the ongoing creation of the new, shared tradition of the parade itself. Some of us bring Christmas, some of us bring Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, or Diwali, or Yule.

I invest this parade, every year I go--and I've gone every year since I discovered it by accident in 1997--with my longing for a community created from the roots up by those who come together out of richly diverse experience, all the while affirming the distinct identities they bring as a gift to enrich the possibilities available to us all. And I'm intensely aware that such community can't be forced, can't be manufactured as a product, but instead has to be nurtured as a living thing: a seed planted in the cold furrow of a winter's night, lovingly tended in the light and warmth of the unconquered and reborn sun.

From year to year you can see subtle shifts in the demographic. There are always parents with small kids, hoisted on shoulders around the final fire circle for a better look at the burning of the Old Year. There's a growing contingent of beautiful, energetic twenty-somethings with piercings cooler than any body fashion statement I'll ever make. The last few festivals have seen a strong and foregrounded First Nations presence.  Always on the lookout for clusters of gay men in the crowd, this year I was happy to be part of such a clan myself, at least momentarily, a gaggle of nine or ten of us. The paper lanterns we'd decorated together a couple of weeks  ago helped us keep track of each other as we flowed with the larger crowd down the narrow streets of the Market and  into the park where we finally torched the Old Year.

I long to be part of a tribe with such men, however intermittently. I long for this to be the first of many years in which we come together as part of this fiercely uncommercialized, rough-hewn celebration of holy darkness and holy light. But such an aspiration calls for a light and flexible grasp, for hope rather than determination. Thinking back on the wonder of Solstice just a few days ago, the shifting constellation of our lanterns floating down the street seems like a parable for what 's required in holding to such an intention:  a few of us out ahead, a few scattered to one side, a few behind: all of us aware of the others, sometimes allowing for distance, sometimes slowing down to regroup or hastening to catch up.

Not All Sweetness and Light

I don’t remember a year in which I’ve been so acutely aware of bright afternoon sunlight as sheer, fleeting gift in late December; nor one in which falling darkness has felt so absolute. I’m trying to sort out how much geography accounts for my heightened awareness: I’ve never before spent a whole winter on eastern Long Island, so close to the leading edge of the time zone that night falls before 5 p.m. The light slants down with a clarity that’s almost a cliché; but the grey of an overcast winter day here somehow sucks the light out of even a well-lit room.

Reminders of mortality all around me account for a lot of what geography can’t explain: a spectacularly gifted friend whom I much admired, dead in November long before his time; another, deeply beloved, with whom I share nearly twenty years of intimate, varied connection, now newly battling an aggressive recurrence of cancer; a third I’ve come to know this last year and a half, now living with a recent diagnosis of lymphoma. All of them, my age or younger. I find myself noticing every ache and pain, and thinking to myself, what kind of cancer could I get?

Hanukkah begins tomorrow at sundown; Thursday (if you’re being astronomically exact about it) comes the Solstice; and Christmas lights are everywhere. I’ve always loved this season—loved it for the poignant bravery of light kindled in darkness. This year, I find myself looking for the lesson somewhere in the darkness itself. In the silence, in the not knowing, in the nothingness that the light shines out of. In giving the darkness its due, before moving too quickly into the attempts to lighten it.

Kevin Smith, in an eloquent and wise and funny post to his TouchPractice blog just a few days ago, wrote this: “Here’s a holiday wish: embrace your bleakest self, the shadow self. That side that you’re NOT listing on your resume these days. The photos that you’re NOT posting. Just look at it. Acknowledge it. And lest you fear that doing so in some way might grant the part of yourself that you’re not thrilled with some sort of permanence, consider that nothing gets granted permanence, neither the things we love about ourselves nor our biggest disappointments.” (http://touchpractice.com)

I have no idea what I’ll find over the next days, but I know where I need to look for it: wrapped up against the cold, listening to the surf crash, on a beach where perhaps I’ll see stars in the night sky, or perhaps, huddled below cloud, see almost nothing at all.

And then, yes—but only at last—kindle a light.

Enjoying the Light

Once again, thanks to my beloved Jonathan, who shares with me his whole second set of holidays in addition to my own, I’m sitting here watching the candles burn down on the first night of Hanukkah. What a funny holiday it is in the Jewish calendar.

Not commanded anywhere in the Torah, or in the Hebrew Bible at all, it commemorates the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem after its desecration in the second century before the Common Era, as narrated in the Books of Maccabees. 1 and 2 Maccabees survive in the Greek version of the Bible known as the Septuagint and count as Scripture for Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians, but neither for Protestants nor for Jews. Rabbinic tradition, rather than even this quasi-biblical source, attests the miracle by which a supply of oil sufficient for only one day kept the lamp of the Temple burning for eight, until a fresh supply could be found.

What’s more than a little unsettling, these sources (especially 1 Maccabees) embody a tendentious politics of cultural purity: modern scholarship mostly argues (more in line with the author of 2 Maccabees) that at stake was not so much a foreign oppression of Jewish faith as a civil war between traditionalists in the countryside and more liberal, multiculturally oriented Jews in Jerusalem. It’s as though Southern Baptists from Northern Alabama were to pick a fight with liberal Episcopalians, win a bloody war against them, and then write what became the definitive history of the conflict.

But set aside all that’s suspect about how Hanukkah came to be, and consider what it is, or can be. Like the Solstice three weeks from now, it’s about light in the darkness. It’s about hope when hope seems to be extinguished. Like Advent, it’s about waiting for deliverance beyond our power to deliver ourselves. For that matter, like Diwali in the Hindu calendar, now nearly four weeks past, it’s about the victory of good over evil.

And yet, it’s not a serious holiday. It’s for kids, and it only gets hyped in North America because it offers a culturally specific alternative to Christmas. It’s about playing with spinning tops, and chocolate coins, and eating potato pancakes and singing sometimes silly, not always particularly edifying songs. Unlike the core holidays of the Jewish year, there’s no prohibition against work on the first days of the eight-day celebration.

But at the heart of Hanukkah–and this is what I love–is the injunction to enjoy its light. The candles of the Hanukkah menorah are supposed to be gratuitous. You’re to appreciate them, not use them for practical purposes. They’re there as a kind of holy play, an occasion to invite their beauty into one’s soul, for as long as it takes them to burn down completely; an invitation to lose oneself in a sense of security that comes from beyond ourselves, in the presence of which it’s safe to dwell.