As we enter into the season of Advent, the four week run up to its culmination in “The Nativity of the Lord” and the Christmas mystery, we are once again made mindful not merely of the motif of darkness and light, but more so of the motif of the birthing of new life from darkness into light.
It strikes me that this is the alpha and omega of our faith and offers a ray of hope in times when a wintry spirituality is thrust upon us.
We see this theme in the opening lines and chapter of the Book of Genesis when “darkness covered the face of the deep” and then the Original Artist said, “’Let there be light’; and there was light.” We see this in the season of Advent when the Christ-child gestates in the darkness of his mother’s womb before being birthed forth into the light of day and the first day of life. We hear this every year in the first reading from the prophet Isaiah 9:1 – 6 at the Christmas Eve Midnight Mass–
The people who walked in darkness;
have seen a great light,
upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom
a light has shone.
— in which Christians hear the allusion to the Christ-light of Jesus.
We see this theme outside in nature each year when the darkness of winter—even a long winter—eventually breaks forth into the light of spring.
We see it again in the dark days of Jesus’ arrest, torture, death on a cross, and entombment from which he is raised to new life from the darkness of death when, as described in the gospel of Matthew, “his appearance was like lightning.”
All of these stories are meant to help us understand that darkness is not the final word. It is not the last word in the bleak mid-winter of our lives, nor in the darkness of tragedy or trauma or violence or war or injustice or death, nor in the darkness of our own death which, as it was with Jesus, becomes the passageway into the eternal light and the fullness of life.
Today, on the First Sunday of Advent, in the first reading from scripture, we hear Isaiah’s description of all the nations streaming toward the Lord’s house established on the highest mountain, where people will learn to walk in God’s path and justice and peace shall reign. There
they shall beat their swords
into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks;
one nation shall not raise the sword against another,
nor shall they train for war again. (Is. 2: 1-5)
And the final couplet of that reading from Isaiah 2: 5 ends this way:
O house of Judah, come,
Let us walk in the light of the Lord!”
In the darkest of seasons, we do not deny the darkness. But we do not let it convince us that it is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth anymore than we let the bearers of swords and spears deceive us into thinking that they are more life-giving and peace-sustaining than plows and pruning hooks. So, in the wintry seasons of life, we acknowledge the presence of the dark as we live and move (and have our being) in the light of the One for whom we yearn and wait. So help us God.
