A Darkness to Awaken Us

I took a nap this afternoon, and woke to darkened corners and a pinkish hue in the sky that often accompanies twilight. It was a bit disorienting.

These early dark evenings are hard to adjust to. Not only because the light of day illuminates the landscape/cityscape before us, but also because we so routinely segment our day by what occurs between the time the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. 

As dark descends, I feel an internal angst. I have to remind myself that the day isn’t actually over. Ideally, there are still enough hours to finish all that I set out to do.

I’ve had the author Wendell Berry on my mind. I am leading a discussion on one of his novels in a new book club I attend. And so I decided to look up, once again, what he had to offer for Advent. If you know Berry, you know his writing is very pastoral. There are some beautiful poems that can be called Advent poems because of the way they evoke the scenes around Jesus’ manger. But today I was drawn to something that is attributed to Berry’s spoken words. In her book, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, Anne Lamott quotes Berry as saying, 

“It gets darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.”

It sounds so simple.

But there is something deeper here. Maybe I’m reading into it. But I think that’s what we are supposed to do when we are on a road towards Hope. We grab onto every tiny glimmer like it’s a lifeline. A buoy in a storm.

Pastor and poet Evan Welcher wrote a piece for Christianity Today about this. About grief, and darkness, and how it’s often the unexpected that leads us out, if ever so slowly. He says,

“Sometimes all we need to start inching away from the darkness is an acknowledgment of the wreckage . . . I suppose that’s why the prophet Isaiah let us all know that the Christ would be ‘a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief’ (Isaiah 53:3). 

It gets darker, and darker, and then Jesus is born. The same Jesus that Isaiah told us would be a man who knew and understood sorrow and grief.

Did Jesus feel that sorrow, our sorrow, as a part of the Trinity before he plunged into human existence as a tiny baby? Was His grief over all those who had turned and lost their way, like reckless sheep without a shepherd? He can’t have stepped from eternity without a pocketful of heavenly sorrow. Or was his acquaintance with grief a reference to all of this earth creation’s longing to be redeemed?

Jesus was born into the darkness of the world and we called Him the light of life (John 1:4 paraphrase). Indeed, John’s gospel speaks much of this Light. One of the strongest promises we can bring into Advent is this:

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:5)

And yet, during Advent we see the same way the prophets did. The now and not yet. My pastor describes it as looking at a large vista with many scenes to catch our eye, both in the foreground and far off in the distance.

Light entered the world when Jesus was born. The very hour of His birth was illuminated by the brilliance of the star and the chorus of the shining angels. But the real work of conquering death and darkness was still to come. God’s people still lived in despair and pain, wondering when relief would ever come. And unlike heroes of other religions, God sent His son into the very muck and mire the people wanted to escape. He came to live and work, to eat and drink, to laugh and cry. And, eventually, when He had grown in “knowledge and stature,” He came to show us the Way.

Hope’s spark had been lit. That is what we hold fast to when we repeat Berry’s words: It gets darker, and darker, and then Jesus is born.

If the weight of darkness feels extra heavy this season, pause to name it, to acknowledge it. And remember that darkness, like pain, “insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” (C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain).

Together, let us look to the Light.