In this strange season when we are suspended between realization and expectation, may we be found honest about the darkness, more perceptive of the light.
~Jack Boozer

The wonderful thing that happens when a theme is chosen for a season like Advent, a theme around which a community centers itself, is that that theme begins to pop up in places not necessarily associated with that community. Or at least that is what happens for me. When our faith community established a theme like ‘Holy Darkness, Holy Light’, these words, or some related phrases begin to come into my view in the oddest of places.

Take yesterday morning for instance. I took the box of oatmeal out of the cabinet to prepare breakfast. As I was watching the water boil and after I had poured the oatmeal into the cup ready to go into the water, I stood staring at the box marked ‘McCann’s Irish Oatmeal’.There on the side of the box were these words: May you have warm words on a cold evening.A full moon on a dark night. And the road downhill all the way to your door. I smiled at this blessing for the darkness of night. From a box of oatmeal no less!

This season of Advent is a time when we are ‘suspended between realization and expectation.’ We have a sense of the expectation of what births might be possible but they are not realized yet. We know the story and how it turns out but it is not the time to reveal the fullness of it yet. Instead we give attention to the rituals that take the steady, ordered steps in its telling. There is a sweetness in this time honored unfolding. The light of the Advent wreath does not go fully ablaze but is slowly illuminated.

To practice this ‘not yet’ quality of the path toward Christmas requires a certain honesty about darkness. The darkness of these hovering winter days. The darkness of our own ever changing understanding of this story of birth of the Christ Child and of ourselves. This practice requires not moving too quickly through darkness for fear we might miss an important detail we have not noticed before, one that has been hiding in the shadows waiting for just the right time to appear. To move too quickly through the darkness might make the light blinding to our eyes instead of allowing the gradual flicker to become the soft glow that leads us……to what?

On Christmas Eve, as we sing Silent Night, one person will light a candle and pass the light through the waiting darkness of those who hold their breath for want of it. Slowly one light becomes another and another until……..but I get ahead of myself, ahead of our story.

For now it is time to be honest about the darkness. Suspended between realization and expectation.