What is coming upon the world is the Light of the World.
It is Christ.
That is the comfort of it.
The challenge of it is that it has not come yet.
Only the hope for it has come, only the longing for it.
In the meantime we are in the dark,
and the dark, God knows, is also in us.
We watch and wait for a holiness to heal us and hallow us,
to liberate us from the dark.
Advent is like the hush in a theater just before the curtain rises.
It is like the hazy ring around the winter moon that means the coming of snow which will turn the night to silver.
Soon.
But for the time being, our time, darkness is where we are.
~Frederick Buechner from The Clown in the Belfry
Darkness is not where we will dwell forever.
We are hushed in fear and hungry for Light.
We are promised this in the Word:
“and night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light…
Revelation 22:5.
Somewhere between the Word in the beginning
and the Word that becomes flesh
and the Word thriving in our hearts and hands,
there is the sacred silent Light of God come to earth.
This Advent becomes a threshold of quiet stillness,
as we stand poised to cross into the Light brought by His Word;
He is a flint struck to our wick in our eagerness to abolish the Darkness with the eternal glow of His illuminating Word.
My 2025 Advent theme:
On the threshold between day and night
On that day there will be neither sunlight nor cold, frosty darkness.
It will be a unique day—a day known only to the Lord—
with no distinction between day and night.
When evening comes, there will be light.
Zechariah 14:6-7
So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.
~Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk
Lyrics:
In winter’s house there’s a room
that’s pale and still as mist in a field
while outside in the street every gate’s shut firm,
every face as cold as steel.
In winter’s house there’s a bed
that is spread with frost and feathers,
that gleams in the half-light like rain
in a disused yard or a pearl in a choked-up stream.
In winter’s house there’s a child asleep
in a dream of light that grows out of the dark,
a flame you can hold in your hand
like a flower or a torch on the street.
In winter’s house there’s a tale that’s told
of a great chandelier in a garden,
of fire that catches and travels for miles,
of all gates and windows wide open.
In winter’s house there’s a flame
being dreamt by a child in the night,
in the small quiet house at the turn in the lane
where the darkness gives way to light.
~Jane Draycott
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