Darkness has a tangible quality

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For a while at the end of seminary, my husband Nik and I followed a fairly strict routine. Around 8 or so, when it had finally started to get dark in Tennessee, we turned off all the harsh fluorescent lights in our student apartment and lit candles. We called it “candle time,” and we started doing it as a way to spend intentional time together at the end of a long day, to better wind down. There was one evening when my orchestra rehearsal ran long and I biked home in a rush and hurried to the door juggling my French horn, music folder, water bottle, and keys. When I opened the door, instead of more noise, more bright stage lights, more people asking something of me, there was only soft light, warmth, and quiet. And when we finally blew out the candles, some of that warmth remained. Our apartment, rather than being sterile student housing with thin carpeting and ugly cabinets, had been purified somehow. The darkness had been changed.

Darkness is not always empty. Right now, I am rereading Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and there is a point when Meg and the other characters travel to a distant planet by way of a wrinkle in space. While they are traveling, Meg was completely alone. Reflecting back on it after, she realizes: “It was not as simple as darkness, or absence of light. Darkness has a tangible quality; it can be moved through and felt; in darkness you can bark your shins; the world of things still exists around you.”

In Advent, as the days shorten and the nights lengthen, I am finding myself leaning into that darkness, the type of darkness that is full, rather than empty. I am pressing into the penitential Sunday lections and prayers, the apocalyptic Daily Office readings. I am casting around in the dark and realizing I am not alone. The darkness falling in Advent is not the empty darkness of Meg’s travel through space, but a darkness that is full of active waiting, anticipation, and hope. It is the darkness that falls after candle time: holy, refreshing, allowing you to go deeper and deeper, all the while knowing that you are safe.

Post by Carrie Combs

Oh, how I need those candles . . .

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By Ann Perrott

   Each week, when a candle is lit on the Advent wreath, I am reminded that Jesus is the ‘light of the world.’  In between those Advent Sundays part of my focus turns to my work and life as I know it.  And, of course there is a return to reports of war, hunger, homelessness, prison conditions and every other bad thing that is going on in the world.  I can easily feel exhausted with all of it. Why does hope feel so out of reach to me these days?  I have always been an optimist—constantly looking at the glass half full, no matter what the world’s condition.  And even though this Advent season brings a personal grief to my family, I feel overwhelmingly bogged down with hopelessness lately that is evident in almost every corner of the world.

 I have come to understand (after reading a lot of Richard Rohr), that what I need to do is to let go of the “self,” the ego that weighs me down.  My own world view is skewed.  I think to myself, “Why isn’t something being done in this country or that one?  Don’t we have to fix this now before too many thousands more people are killed or hurt?  How many wars can the world take at one time, how many horrible dictators?  So much devastation and I cannot do a thing about it.  I hope God knows how I feel about that situation in the Philippines.”  I feel powerless, and I believe it is because I take God out of the equation and replace it with Ann.  When I do that, darkness can be like a canvas in my life, covering up the light I may be missing.

 Then there is the understanding I have that darkness is a part of life.  There are a lot of wonderful things happening in the world—even all around me.  I have to have better eyes to see and leave the world’s problems to God.