Starlit Darkness

Homily for the First Sunday of Advent, 2006

 Advent is a time for waiting.  The culture around us may be well into its Christmas frenzy, but we hold off: Christmas is four Sundays away.  This is the time of Advent, a time of small lights in the darkness. 

It’s no accident that Advent comes as the days shorten; the growing darkness of brief days is used deliberately by our church to invite us into our inner darkness.  Not the darkness of evil only; there is certainly enough of that, perhaps made vivid for us this year especially in what our parish suffers; but beyond that, most of us also know suffering in our jobs, our families, our hearts.  The darkness of Advent, lit now by but a single candle, is an invitation to consider all that we experience as dark.  We know the promise of the Gospel, that a day will come when we can “lift up our heads and stand erect before the coming of the Son of Man” – but that day is not yet.  Today, we admit that we do not yet live in the full light of joy and accomplishment; we also suffer – and we meet our suffering in the darkness.

Full daylight can be too bright to see some things; just as the stars are invisible at noon, so too are the worries and sorrows that often fill sleepless nights: our concerns about those we love; sadness and grief over hopes unfulfilled, dreams foregone; sad wonder that evils that may seem in their way so little can, like the small hole that sinks a ship or the tiny blood-clot that destroys a loved one’s mind, do so much damage.  In Advent we admit to waking life these late-night thoughts; we let the distractions of the too-bright day go, and let our awareness sink toward the dark bedrock of the mystery that envelops us, but which is too subtle to be seen in full light of day.

Melancholy is a natural feeling in the long nights of winter.  The enforced waiting of Advent, if we allow it to discipline us, gives us time free from distraction – and in that time we may come to appreciate, rather than only to suffer, the incompleteness of our lives.  The broken promises; the beloved lost to death, or drugs, or prison; the friend or family member debilitated by illness from which there is no promise of recovery; the frustrated hope of accomplishment, of satisfaction, of deep and abiding happiness…  Advent invites us not to cover these over, but to allow them their place in our memories, to sit with the sadness which is the proper human response to life unfulfilled.

The single candle of the Advent wreath is not the blaze of daylight.  We become so used to images of Christ as the “Light,” that we need reminding that, now at least, He is light within much darkness, and the darkness has not yet been taken away.  Joy that forgets this is false, superficial; Christian faith does not take away sadness, but only reminds us that it does not have the last word, and so we can afford to be sad in the face of much that calls for that response: families separated by war, fruitless searches for work, illness, emotional pain, betrayals, and more. 

This Advent in our parish may hold special kinds of sadness for many parishioners; the news of Fr. Tom; or a child in military service in danger in Iraq or Afghanistan; the first Christmas without a spouse, a parent, or a child lost to death; or a recent great loss of some other sort known only to you and to a few others.    We do not greet Advent with a blaze of candles, as if Christ had already taken away all sadness; for Christ gives us courage to admit that he has not done that, and to claim He has is not religion but delusion.  We enter Advent before daring to experience Christmas joy so that we can be grounded in the truth, truth about Christ and about ourselves.  The Advent candle reminds us of the hope the Gospel offers: Someday we shall “raise our heads” – but not yet.  There is a place for sadness in the dark of Advent.  It has something to teach us, if we do not flee from it.  It reminds us, if nothing else, of how deeply we long for the visitation that promises us salvation.  Our God, in Advent as in so much of this life, is not yet the sun of life fulfilled.  These winter nights invite us to hope in God who comes to us now notas the sun, but rather as a starlit darkness.