Advent: awaiting light in the winter darkness

I love the dark. 

Not the depressing, foreboding, frightening dark. I mean the creative dark that serves as messenger of insights; the humble dark that hangs as backdrop of brilliant lights; the biological dark that gestates life; the soothing dark that beckons us to sleep; the holy dark that germinates revelations. 

For these reasons, the season of Advent is my favorite. It comes just a few weeks after the annoying affront to our natural circadian rhythms — aka Daylight Savings Time — has finally been put back in its fabricated place. Darkness now has its normal, healthy growth as lengths of days shorten.

And although it is worth the wait for the late night of summer to see a sensational kaleidoscope of fireworks or the humble blinking of fireflies, the gathering darkness of Advent has a deeper, richer quality. It leads us to the ultimate light – the birth of the Light of World.  

We see flares of light in darkness throughout the Gospels: “. . .the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:5)
“He was transfigured before their eyes. His face became as dazzling as the sun, his clothes as radiant as light.” (Matt 17:2) “As the lightning from the east flashes to the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be.” (Matt 24:27)

I can imagine the body of Jesus itself being a light in the darkness — when he spent nights in prayer, when he walked on the water toward the apostles “at about three in the morning” (Matt 14: 25), when he instructed Nicodemus “who came to him at night” (John 3:2), and when he was arrested in Gethsemane on the night of Holy Thursday.  

As the lengthening nights of Advent lead to Christmas, we come upon what the anonymous Carthusian monk referenced in The Prayer of Love and Silence: “. . .the triple veil of the maternal womb, the cave, and the night.” That is serious darkness. Yet with the Light born that night, accompanying light was displayed as the hosts of angels manifested in the dark sky.

I might say that the Lord’s resurrection also emerged from a triple veil of darkness: the burial cloth, the tomb, and the night. The Shroud of Turin testifies that a burst of ultraviolet light left that impression on the cloth. Rev. Robert Spitzer, SJ, gives an awesome account of this reality in his book God So Loved the World.

Can it be said that the deeper the darkness, the more powerful the ensuing light? Let’s defer to Belgian Catholic priest Georges Lemaître who, in 1927, proposed “the Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of the creation.” Big Bang Theory, anyone? (Fine-tuned by Edwin Hubble a few years later, of course.) 

From that outer-space event to my inner-space experience, there are occasional episodes of insomnia. Here, I feel the weight of waiting for something to happen, which turns out to be simply the reappearance of the sun to reassure me it is time to get up anyway. But during the darkness, during the wait, I desire a deeper sunrise. As the psalmist says, “My soul waits for the Lord more than the watchmen for daybreak. More than watchmen for daybreak, let Israel wait for the Lord.” (Psalm 130:6-7).

All such things are recognized in the dark, even as He calls us “from darkness into his marvelous light.” (1 Peter 2:9) He beckons us during Advent to the light of Christmas, the light of interior epiphany, and the light of his Second Coming. 

In the meantime, I look to poetic reassurance in the Second Letter of St. Peter: “Keep your eyes fixed upon it as you would upon a lamp shining in a dark place, until the first streaks of dawn appear, and the morning star rises in your hearts.” (2 Peter 1:19)

Beth Lynch is pilgrimage coordinator and museum manager at the Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs in Auriesville.