It feels like Christmas.
In Florida.
People are walking outside without jackets. School kids are boarding the buses in shorts.
And it’s dark.
Only a few days out from the solstice, we rise long before sunrise. At my house, the outdoor Christmas lights are on before we get the daily mail. But this December is darker than most because it’s also so warm. “El Nino” won’t let the jet stream dip down far enough for us to have snow. So the ground is dark when the sun goes down. There is no frozen white stuff to reflect the streetlights, the moon, or twinkling stars. It’s just dark.
“El Nino” means “the boy,” and actually refers to the Christ-child. I suppose that’s because this weather pattern always develops around Christmas. People who don’t like snow might be glad to give credit to Jesus for warm Decembers, but for me, the snow makes long nights and short days more bearable.
I’m trying to resign myself to a brown Christmas and make the best of it. (Meteorologists are predicting we’ll top 60 degrees on Christmas Day.) I sit in our living room with no light but the tiny colored bulbs strung on the tree, listening to seasonal music on the stereo, and reminding myself that all this darkness is what Advent is really about. We are preparing to celebrate the birth of Christ – the coming of the Light of the World. Advent bids us to sit in the darkness and ponder the gift of light.
This invitation isn’t as clear as it used to be. Our lives are full of artificial light that turns on with the flip of a switch. When it goes out, getting it back on is usually a matter of replacing a bulb, or in extreme cases, a circuit breaker. Light is around us all the time. When natural light retreats, we still see the flicker of the television screen, headlights on cars, street lamps, and all those red and green digital dots and clock readouts that are still burning after you’ve supposedly “turned out the lights.” Most people alive today have never experienced total darkness.
Only three generations back, most people lived without electric lights, because electricity had not yet been mass-produced. After sunset, gas and oil lamps provided the only light available. So, in that sense, our great-grandparents were closer to the time of the Bible than they were to us. They were well acquainted with darkness so complete they could not see their hands in front of their faces. Consequently, they understood the power of Jesus as “the true light.”
The prologue to John’s gospel testifies, “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness did not overcome it.” That’s an important promise. No amount or intensity of despair is able to snuff out the hope Christ brings to the world. But let’s be careful not to misread those words. The darkness did not overcome it. We who have thoroughly banished darkness with an abundance of artificial light are apt to invert John’s testimony by saying that the light of Jesus overcame the darkness, but that’s not what the gospel tells us.
As our ancestors understood better than we do, darkness has a role to play. Without it, our bodies don’t get enough rest. Plus, we don’t really appreciate light unless we know what darkness is like. When God created the heavens and the earth, Genesis 1 tells us, God separated the light from the darkness. God did not banish the darkness, but simply separated it from the light. Dark and light are both part of life.
Traditional Christmas Eve services metaphorically represent this point well. We sing “Silent Night” by candlelight. What makes that moment so palpably sacred is the absence of any light save that provided by flickering candles. It wouldn’t mean nearly as much if we kept the overhead lights on. It’s the light in the midst of the darkness that speaks to us.
Like the season of Advent, there are seasons of life that seem very dark to us. It has become fairly standard in our spiritual language to equate darkness with evil and light with righteousness. That makes dark times even more difficult for people passing through them. But it seems to me that, while darkness is one metaphor for evil, not all darkness is evil. In fact, it provides the place where true light shines. And so, just like Advent, those darker seasons of our lives are times for us to be silent, to reflect, even to embrace our pain, and let God share it with us. The darkness is not a place where God is absent. In fact, sometimes, the most important place to meet God is in the darkness.
In the deep shadows of grief, heartache, and weariness, God gives us light – not brilliant light, and certainly not an end to all darkness, but just enough light that we can find our way forward with hope.
©2015 by J. Mark Lawson
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