Advent can be a potent time for Second Force to manifest.
It's bound to happen this way. If we have a strong First Force, then a strong Second Force will rise to oppose it. We must look to the Third Force, the Reconciling Force, to resolve the conflicts and problems that are all too common at Advent.
What is our First Force at this time? Obviously, for those of us in the Work it will be preparing to celebrate Christmas, both in the inner and outer worlds. For people in life, without any religious faith, Christmas preparations will consist merely of material goods. Buying presents, stocking up with food and drink, decorating the home, going to Christmas parties - all these are part of life's Christmas rituals.
And they surely apply to Work students, too. We need to show on an outer level what Christmas means to us spiritually; we want to share our celebrations with others, and to experience that much-needed New Birth in Essence.
But for those in the Work, the inner preparations are much more important. For Catholic and Orthodox Christians, Advent is a time of extra spiritual reading, extra prayers, extra efforts of fasting and abstinence, and so it must be for us.
For Christians, the season of Advent is quite distinct from that of Christmas itself. Advent is that quiet season of expectation, anticipation, and hope. Catholic churches will cover their statues and artwork with purple drapery, as in Lent, to symbolize the fact that Christ has not yet been born in the liturgical year.
On Christmas Eve, for the Midnight Mass, the churches will be decorated, and will display the traditional Crib for the arrival of the Christ Child. The Child will be symbolically laid in the manger during the Midnight Mass ceremony, and then Christmas will truly begin.
In the UK, which retains so many Catholic traditions, we celebrate the entire season of Christmas through to January 6, Twelfth Night. Only then do we take down our Christmas tree and other decorations. Superstition has it that it's bad luck to remove them before that date - and in many Catholic countries the end of the season is marked by Twelfth Night parties and gifts, just as in Shakespeare's time.
When I lived in the US, I noticed with dismay that many Christmas trees were thrown out on December 26th - our Boxing Day. There they lay, forlorn and abandoned, as if Christmas had consisted in only that one day. For many Americans, and increasingly for many Britons too, that has become true. Christmas is one day - then on to the orgy of spending on Boxing Day! There is no time to digest the new impressions that should be falling on Essence during Christmas.
In the Work, while we too must make material preparations to celebrate Christmas, they take second place to our spiritual life. We may increase the length of our meditations, add extra readings from Scripture and Work books, and make special efforts to remember ourselves as we go about the bustle of everyday life.
No matter how far ahead we have tried to prepare for Christmas, however, there is always Second Force during Advent. We meet it in the outer world, in the form of travelling delays, crowded shops, fatigue, lack of time. It's important not to become identified with any of that. Instead, we find we must make extra efforts to remember ourselves in the midst of all this apparent chaos.
In our inner world, however, no matter how difficult our outer circumstances may be, Advent can always be a fruitful season. Gurdjieff said that when the outer world presented him with "roses, roses", then in his inner world there were thorns. And vice versa! He asked his students which they thought he preferred.
He was trying to show them that the struggle with Second Force can serve to increase our wish to be, to keep the aim of experiencing a New Birth in Essence. Second Force is difficult, even painful at times, but it is necessary, otherwise we grow slack and complacent.
Whether we meet it in the right way, of course, depends on keeping the Third Force of the Work in our consciousness. Christmas, for us, is not simply a time for parties and celebrations. It is that, of course, and quite rightly, though in Work groups not too much celebration takes place before Christmas Eve; but inwardly, the joy we hope for at Christmas is the result of constant efforts to remember ourselves in the preceding weeks, creating the higher hydrogens that allow our Higher Emotional Centre to speak to us.
It is in that Centre, symbolized by the Virgin Mary, that Christ will be born in us. That Centre is pure of any negative emotion, which is why the Blessed Virgin is such a powerful symbol for us. She is Immaculate, as is our Higher Emotional Centre. Nothing dirty, nothing spoiled by life, touches her.
For people without any spiritual beliefs, Advent and Christmas can become a very negative time. There is bound to be a good deal of stress, because of the importance of the celebration to come and all the expectation we place upon it. And conversations can run negative because of this - people can begin talking about how they hate Christmas, how the stress is making them tired and ill, and so on.
In our Work groups, Marian always gave us the task of turning these inevitable life conversations around so that a potential negative energy was transformed and the situation redeemed by our goodwill. No matter what other Work tasks we had, this was always extremely important.
Without the Third Force of the Work or of Christian Love, life takes over during Advent and Christmas and makes them barren of hope. Presents are never up to expectations. Parties end in fights and disputes. Hangovers, quarrels, family separations - all can bring about more entropy and more chaos in life.
But with the Work as our Third Force, we can transcend the latent negativity and any stress we are experiencing, and use the extra effort to create a beautiful and fulfilling Christmas birth.
May the Christ Child be born in you this Christmas!
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