The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned. ~Isaiah 9:2
Advent is the season that, when properly understood, does not flinch from the darkness that stalks us all in this world. Advent begins in the dark and moves toward the light—but the season should not move too quickly or too glibly, lest we fail to acknowledge the depth of the darkness.
As our Lord Jesus tells us, unless we see the light of God clearly, what we call light is actually darkness: “how great is that darkness!” (Matt. 6:23).
Advent bids us take a fearless inventory of the darkness: the darkness without and the darkness within.
Advent is designed to show thatthe meaning of Christmas is diminished to the vanishing point if we are not willing to take a fearless inventory of the darkness. ~Fleming Rutledge from Advent- The Once & Future Coming of Jesus Christ
It is this great absence that is like a presence, that compels me to address it without hope of a reply. It is a room I enter
from which someone has just gone, the vestibule for the arrival of one who has not yet come. I modernise the anachronism
of my language, but he is no more here than before. Genes and molecules have no more power to call him up than the incense of the Hebrews
at their altars. My equations fail as my words do. What resources have I other than the emptiness without him of my whole being, a vacuum he may not abhor? ~R.S. Thomas “The Absence”
There is no light in the incarnation without witnessing the empty darkness that precedes His arrival; His reason for crossing the threshold into our world is to fill our increasing spiritual void, our hollow hearts, our growing deficit of hope and faith.
God abhors a vacuum.
We find our God most when we keenly feel His absence, hearing no reply to our prayers, our faith shaken, not knowing if such unanswered prayers are heard.
In response, He answers. He comes to walk beside us. He comes to be present among us, to ransom us from our self-captivity by offering up Himself instead.
He fills the vacuum completely and forever.
In der Christnacht Lyrics and translation below
Dies ist die Nacht, da mir erschienen des großen Gottes Freundlichkeit! Das Kind, dem alle Engel dienen bringt Licht in meine Dunkelheit, und dieses Welt- und Himmelslicht weicht hundert-tausend Sonnen nicht!
Lass dich erleuchten, meine Seele, versäume nicht den Gnadenschein! Der Glanz in dieser kleinen Höhle dringt bald in alle Welt hinein, er treibet weg der Hölle Macht, der Sünden und des Todes Nacht!
On Christmas Nighttranslation
This is the night on which I saw the kindness of the Almighty power: the Child whom all the angels serve brought light into my darkest hour – the light of heaven that yields to none: not even a hundred thousand suns.
Let it illumine thee, my soul, and shy not from its grace; so bright the radiance from this cave, it soon will fill the very earth with light, will chase the powers of hell away, and sin, and turn death’s night to day.
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These still December mornings… Outside everything’s tinted rose, grape, turquoise, silver–the stones by the path, the skin of the sun
on the pond ice, at the night the aureola of a pregnant moon, like me, iridescent, almost full term with light. ~Luci Shaw from “Advent Visitation“in Accompanied by Angels
Writer Luci Shaw passed into eternity on December 1, just four weeks from her 97th birthday.
A life-long poet and essayist, in addition to being a wife, mother, publisher, gardener and outdoor enthusiast, Luci was a child of God who continually lived out and articulated the questions of faith, grace, and belief.
It is my privilege to have known her as a neighbor in nearby Bellingham. Her books grace my shelves and I cherish her many personal words of encouragement and mentoring.
Luci has gifted the world for decades with beauty and honesty, composing enriching poetic observations with heavenly anticipation. She was nearly full term, iridescent with light which glowed on those around her.
Below is only a small sample of her work. She was still writing and publishing poetry this year. More of her writing and many books can be found at www.lucishaw.com.
Luci Shaw -virtual presentation for Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing 2022
Last night I lay awake and practiced getting old. Not difficult,
but I needed to teach myself to love my destination before I arrive.
I feel the earth shifting under me. My writing hand shakes—its rubbery nudges clumsy,
my mind going slack, the way a day will lose its light and give itself to darkness,
and that long, nocturnal pause of inquiry— What next? And how long before light
reopens her blue eye? And will I need to learn a new language to converse with my Creator?
So, I am a questioner, one who waits, still, to arrive somewhere, some bright nest where
a new language breeds that I can learn to speak, unhindered, into heaven’s air,
somewhere I can live a long time, and never have to look back. ~Luci Shaw “December the 95th Year”
Luci Shaw at a Bellingham reading at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church -2017
In time of drought, let us be thankful for this very gentle rain, a gift not to be disdained though it is little and brief, reaching no great depth, barely kissing the leaves’ lips. Think of it as mercy. Other minor blessings may show up—tweezers for splinters, change for the parking meter, a green light at the intersection, a cool wind that lifts away summer’s suffocating heat. An apology after a harsh comment. A word that opens an unfinished poem like a key in a lock. ~Luci Shaw “Signs” from Eye of the Beholder.
Luci at a Bellingham reading of her poetry at Village Books in 2016
Today, in Bellingham, even the sidewalks gleam. Small change glints from the creases in the lady’s mantle and the hostas after the rain that falls, like grace, unmerited. My pockets are full, spilling over. ~Luci Shaw from “Small Change”
Out of the shame of spittle, the scratch of dirt, he made an anointing.
Oh, it was an agony-the gravel in the eye, the rude slime, the brittle clay caked on the lid.
But with the hurt light came leaping; in the shock and shine, abstracts took flesh and flew;
winged words like view and space, shape and shade and green and sky, bird and horizon and sun,
What next, she wonders, with the angel disappearing, and her room suddenly gone dark.
The loneliness of her news possesses her. She ponders how to tell her mother.
Still, the secret at her heart burns like a sun rising. How to hold it in— that which cannot be contained.
She nestles into herself, half-convinced it was some kind of good dream, she its visionary.
But then, part dazzled, part prescient— she hugs her body, a pod with a seed that will split her. ~Luci Shaw “Mary Considers Her Situation”
When, in the cavern darkness, the child first opened his mouth (even before his eyes widened to see the supple world his lungs had breathed into being), could he have known that breathing trumps seeing? Did he love the way air sighs as it brushes in and out through flesh to sustain the tiny heart’s iambic beating, tramping the crossroads of the brain like donkey tracks, the blood dazzling and invisible, the corpuscles skittering to the earlobes and toenails? Did he have any idea it would take all his breath to speak in stories that would change the world? ~Luci Shaw “Breath” from Accompanied By Angels: Poems of the Incarnation
because we are all betrayers, taking silver and eating body and blood and asking (guilty) is it I and hearing him say yes it would be simple for us all to rush out and hang ourselves but if we find grace to weep and wait after the voice of morning has crowed in our ears clearly enough to break our hearts he will be there to ask us each again do you love me ~Luci Shaw “Judas, Peter” from Polishing the Petoskey Stone
Down he came from up, and in from out, and here from there. A long leap, an incandescent fall from magnificent to naked, frail, small, through space, between stars, into our chill night air, shrunk, in infant grace, to our damp, cramped earthy place among all the shivering sheep.
And now, after all, there he lies, fast asleep. ~Luci Shaw “Descent” from Accompanied By Angels
Blue homespun and the bend of my breast keep warm this small hot naked star fallen to my arms. (Rest … you who have had so far to come.) Now nearness satisfies the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies whose vigor hurled a universe. He sleeps whose eyelids have not closed before. His breath (so slight it seems no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps to sprout a world. Charmed by doves’ voices, the whisper of straw, he dreams, hearing no music from his other spheres. Breath, mouth, ears, eyes he is curtailed who overflowed all skies, all years. Older than eternity, now he is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed to my poor planet, caught that I might be free, blind in my womb to know my darkness ended, brought to this birth for me to be new-born, and for him to see me mended I must see him torn. ~Luci Shaw “Mary’s Song”
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
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Even in the darkness where I sit And huddle in the midst of misery I can remember freedom, but forget That every lock must answer to a key, That each dark clasp, sharp and intimate, Must find a counter-clasp to meet its guard. Particular, exact and intricate, The clutch and catch that meshes with its ward. I cry out for the key I threw away That turned and over turned with certain touch And with the lovely lifting of a latch Opened my darkness to the light of day. O come again, come quickly, set me free, Cut to the quick to fit, the master key. ~Malcolm Guite “O Clavis” from Sounding the Seasons
And I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David. He shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open… to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness. Isaiah 22:22 and 42:7
Some doors in our lives appear forever closed and locked. No key, no admittance, no way in, no way out. A locked door leaves few choices until the key is offered to us.
We now must make a choice, even if the choice is to do nothing.
Do we drop the key and stay put where things are at least familiar? Do we knock and politely wait for the door to be answered? Do we simply wait for the moment it happens to open, take a peek and decide whether or not to enter? Or do we boldly put the key in and walk through?
Our choice is as plain as the key resting in our trembling hand. Once we approach, drawn to the mystery, we find the door is already standing open with an invitation.
Fear not. For unto us a child is born, a son is given.
He is the threshold between two worlds, between the darkness and the light, a liminal love allowing us to hold the key.
From the fourth stanza of O Come, O Come Emmanuel:
O come, thou Key of David, come and open wide our heav’nly home; make safe the way that leads on high, and close the path to misery.
AI image created for this post
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
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I wanted a horse. This was long after we sold the work horses, and I was feeling
restless on the farm. I got up early to help my father milk the cows, talking
a blue streak about TV cowboys he never had time to see and trying to
convince him that a horse wouldn’t cost so much and that I’d do all the work.
He listened while he leaned his head against the flank of a Holstein, pulling
the last line of warm milk into the stainless bucket. He kept listening
while the milk-machine pumped like an engine, and the black and silver cups fell off and
dangled down, clanging like bells when he stepped away, balancing the heavy milker
against the vacuum hose and the leather belt. I knew he didn’t want the trouble
of a horse, but I also knew there was nothing else I wanted the way I wanted a horse—
another way of saying I wanted to ride into the sunset and (maybe)
never come back—I think he knew that too. We’ll see, he said, we’ll see what we can do. Joyce Sutphen – “What Every Girl Wants”
I once was a skinny freckled eleven year old girl who wanted nothing more than to have her own horse. Every inch of my bedroom wall had posters of horses, all my shelves were filled with horse books and horse figurines and my bed was piled with stuffed horses.
I suffered an extremely serious case of horse fever. I wished for a horse more than anything.
I had learned to ride my big sister’s horse while my sister was off to college, but the little mare had pushed down a hot wire to get into a field of spring oats which resulted in a terrible case of colic and had to be put down. I was inconsolable until I set my mind to buy another horse. We had only a small shed, not a real barn, and no actual fences other than the electric hot wire. Though I was earning money as best I could picking berries at 3 cents a pound and babysitting at 30 cents an hour, I was a long way away from the $150 it would take to buy a trained horse back in 1965.
I pestered my father about my dreams of another horse, and since he was the one to dig the hole for my sister’s horse to be buried, he was not enthusiastic. “We’ll see,” he said. “We will see what we can do.”
So I dreamed my horsey dreams, mostly about golden horses with long white manes, hoping one day those dreams might come true.
In fall 1965, the local radio station KGY’s Saturday morning horse news program announced their “Win a Horse” contest. I knew I had to try. The prize was a weanling bay colt, part Appaloosa, part Thoroughbred, and the contest was only open to youth ages 9 to 16 years old. All I had to do was write a 250 word or less essay on “Why I Should Have a Horse”.
I worked and worked on my essay, crafting the right words and putting all my heart into it, hoping the judges would see me as a worthy potential owner. My parents took me to visit the five month old colt named “Prankster”, a fuzzy engaging little fellow who was getting plenty of attention from all the children coming to visit him, and that visit made me even more determined.
When I read these words now, I realize there is nothing quite like the passion of an eleven year old girl:
“Why I Should Have a Horse”
When God created the horse, He made one of the best creatures in the world. Horses are a part of me. I love them and want to win Prankster for the reasons which follow:
To begin with, I’m young enough to have the time to spend with the colt. My older sister had a horse when she was in high school and her school activities kept her too busy to really enjoy the horse. I’ll have time to give Prankster the love and training needed.
Another reason is that I’m shy. When I was younger I found it hard to talk to anybody except my family. When my sister got the horse I soon became a more friendly person. When her horse recently died (about when Prankster was born), I became very sad. If I could win that colt, I couldn’t begin to describe my happiness.
Also I believe I should have a horse because it would be a good experience to learn how to be patient and responsible while teaching Prankster the same thing.
When we went to see Prankster, I was invited into the stall to brush him. I was never so thrilled in my life! The way he stood there so majestically, it told me he would be a wonderful horse.
If I should win him, I would be the happiest girl alive. I would work hard to train him with love and understanding. If I could only get the wonderful smell and joy of horses back in our barn!
I mailed in my essay and waited.
Sixty years ago on November 27, 1965, my mother and I listened to the local horse program that was always featured on the radio at 8 AM on Saturday mornings. They said they had over 300 essays to choose from, and it was very difficult for them to decide who the colt should go to. I knew then I didn’t have a chance. They had several consolation prizes for 2nd through 4th place, so they read several clever poems and heartfelt essays, all written by teenagers. My heart was sinking by the minute.
The winning essay was next. The first sentence sounded very familiar to me, but it wasn’t until several sentences later that we realized they were reading my essay, not someone else’s. My mom was speechless, trying to absorb the hazards of her little girl owning a young untrained horse.
I woke up my dad, who was sick in bed with an early season flu bug. He opened one eye, looked at me, and said, “I guess I better get a fence up today, right?” Somehow, fueled by the excitement of a daughter whose one wish had just come true, he pulled himself together and put up a wood corral that afternoon, despite feeling so miserable.
That little bay colt came home to live with me the next day. Over the next few months he and I did learn together, as I checked out horse training books from the library, and joined a 4H group with helpful leaders to guide me. I made plenty of mistakes along the way, learning from each one, including those that left behind scars I still bear.
Prankster was a typical adolescent gelding who lived up to his name — full of mischief with a sense of humor and a penchant for finding trouble, but he was mine and that was all that mattered.
Dreams do come true.
…that and a dad who saw what he needed to do for his passionate kid. I’ll never forget how he showed his love for me by doing what was needed in that moment.
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I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me. ~N. Scott Momaday
photo by Nate Gibson
If I am brutally honest with myself after my recent cardiac brush with my mortality, one of my worst fears is to have lived on this earth for a handful of decades and then pass away forgotten, inconsequential, having left behind no legacy of significance whatsoever.
I’m well aware it is self-absorbed to feel the need to leave a mark, but a search for purpose and meaning lasting beyond my time here provides new momentum for each day. The forgetting can happen so fast.
Most people know little about their great-great-grandparents, if they even know their names. A mere four generations, a century, renders us dust, not just in flesh, but in memory as well. There may be a yellowed photograph in a box somewhere, perhaps a tattered postcard or letter written in elegant script, but the essence of this person is long lost and forgotten.
We owe it to our descendants to write down the stories about who we were while we lived on this earth. We need to share why we lived, for whom we lived, for what we lived.
I suspect, although I try every day to record some part of who I am, it will be no different with me and those who come after me. Whether or not we are remembered by great-great grandchildren or become part of the dreams of creatures in the depths of the seas:
we are just dust here and there is no changing that.
Good thing this is not our only home. Good thing we are more than mere memory and dreams. Good thing the river of life flows into an eternity that transcends good works or long memories or legacies left behind. Good thing we are loved that much and always will be. You see, we are alive, we are alive, forever and ever, Amen.
I remember your lectures, Professor Scott Momaday, now nearly two years after you passed from this earth at age 89 – your voice, your stories and your poetry live on.
You are alive. You are alive…
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overly delicate, like a flower skimmed of all fragrance.
You hear in the long last notes of the nightingale’s song
how to harbor what’s left of joy, how spring clutches
the green shoot of life and holds on and on through summer, prepares
for no end that is sure in coming, the fall ever endlessly repeating. ~Maureen Doallas “Recounting Seasons”, from Neruda’s Memoirs
Like in old cans of paint the last green hue, these leaves are sere and rough and dull-complected behind the blossom clusters in which blue is not so much displayed as it’s reflected;
They do reflect it imprecise and teary, as though they’d rather have it go away, and just like faded, once blue stationery, they’re tinged with yellow, violet and gray;
As in an often laundered children’s smock, cast off, its usefulness now all but over, one senses running down a small life’s clock.
Yet suddenly the blue revives, it seems, and in among these clusters one discovers a tender blue rejoicing in the green. ~Rainer Maria Rilke “Blue Hydrangea” Translation by Bernhard Frank
One of my greatest joys is watching our farm’s plants as days become weeks, then months, and as years flow by, the seasons’ palettes repeat endlessly.
In the “olden” days, many farmers kept daily hand-written diaries to track the events of the seasons: when the soil was warm enough to sow, when the harvest was ready, the highs and lows of temperature fluctuations, how many inches in the rain gauge, how deep the snow.
Now we follow the years with a swift scroll in our photo collection in our phones: the tulips bloomed two weeks later this year, or the tomatoes ripened early or the pears were larger two years ago.
I am comforted things tend to repeat predictably year after year, yet I can spot subtle differences. Our hydrangea bushes are a harbinger of soil conditions and seasonal change: they bloomed a darker burgundy color this year, with fewer blue tones. Their blooms always fade eventually into blended earth tones, then blanche, finally losing color altogether and becoming skeletal.
And so it is with me. I collect joy by noticing each change, knowing the repetition of the seasons and the cycle of blooming will continue as I too fade.
I am only a recorder of fact, documenting as long as I’m able.
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The last remaining cherry tree on our farm, a Royal Anne, has stood between house and barn for over 100 years. This year, its branch joints and bark defects are bleeding – oozing sculptures of amber sap.
The resin is hard and glass-like, reflecting the tree’s slow internal circulation, changing subtly day by day.
Though its cherries burst months ago with juicy flavor, now it bleeds crystalline flames from its wounds.
What a gift is this love bleeding out as it moves deep inside an old trunk. In its thirsty anguish, our dear cherry tree is weeping, creating glass fruit reflecting Light.
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Everyone suddenly burst out singing; And I was filled with such delight As prisoned birds must find in freedom, Winging wildly across the white Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight.
Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted; And beauty came like the setting sun: My heart was shaken with tears; and horror Drifted away. . . O, but Everyone Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done. ~Siegried Sassoon “Everyone Sang”
“Hope” is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard – And sore must be the storm – That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land – And on the strangest Sea – Yet – never – in Extremity, It asked a crumb – of me. ~Emily Dickinson “Hope is the thing with feathers”
When it feels like the world is rent in two, and the gulf into which we topple too wide and dark to climb without help, we can look to the sky and see the birds’ stitching and hear their wordless singing, the careful caring line of connection pulling us out of a hopeless hole, startled and grateful to be made whole. Hope borne on feathered wings: may we fly threaded and knitted to one another, singing.
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On a rainy day in Seattle stumble into any coffee shop and look wounded by the rain.
Say Last time I was in I left my black umbrella here. A waitress in a blue beret will pull a black umbrella
from behind the counter and surrender it to you like a sword at your knighting.
Unlike New Englanders, she’ll never ask you to describe it, never ask what day you came in,
she’s intimate with rain and its appointments. Look positively reunited with this black umbrella
and proceed to Belltown and Pike Place. Sip cappuccino at the Cowgirl Luncheonette on First Ave.
Visit Buster selling tin salmon silhouettes undulant in the wind, nosing ever into the oncoming,
meandering watery worlds, like you and the black umbrella, the one you will lose on purpose at the day’s end
so you can go the way you came into the world, wet looking. ~Rick Agran “Black Umbrellas” from Crow Milk
rainy day from a Starbucks shop in Edinburgh ScotlandPike Street Market in Seattleanywhere today in western Washington
Anyone using an umbrella in the Pacific Northwest must have come from somewhere else where rain drenches. In the northwest, we have at least 5 kinds of gray drizzle, none of which usually requires an umbrella.
This is embarrassing, but in my archive of over 20,000 photos, there is not one umbrella. I don’t even own one, having lived here for over 70 years.
We’re all about hooded jackets or going bare-headed if necessary.
Don’t ask me why, but it is a stubborn cultural “I’m a native” thing and umbrellas seem like too much of a bother, a sign of weakness.
I appreciated my visits to Japan which can have torrential but brief rainstorms, and almost every shop had a bucket of umbrellas at the door that you could “borrow” and then drop off at your next stop. No keeping track. Very civilized.
But not here.
I think Washingtonians just like to be rebaptized, over and over… Maybe that’s why.
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He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. John 1:2-5
Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heav’n: to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity; in the habitation of thy glory and dominion, world without end. Amen. ~John Donne – a prayer
For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 2 Corinthians 4:6
It seems impossible that God could be contained within the darkness of a womb.
The Creator, who made the heavens, went deep into His vast inner universe of atoms and sub-atomic particles. He hosted tiny cellular nuclei within His body, instead of the heaven-flung massive nebulae in distant galaxies.
And He chose to do this. Out of His love and goodness, He became Light in the darkest space of the human body, to be birthed to illuminate a world bent on destruction.
From radiance to ribosomes, from cosmos to cytoplasm, from galaxies to Golgi apparatus, from moons to mitochondria, from utter darkness to “let there be light.”
And there is Light. God is there, coming from above and coming from within.
I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.
Lyrics: Through love to light! Oh, wonderful the way That leads from darkness to the perfect day! From darkness and from sorrow of the night To morning that comes singing o’er the sea. Through love to light! Through light, O God, to thee, Who art the love of love, the eternal light of light!
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