GETTING THERE?

    This year, the Fourth Sunday in Advent is also the first day of shortening nights. It’s as if the fourth candle had an infinitesimal but enormous effect: infinitesimal in time (a few minutes), enormous in space (all over the hemisphere). We are approaching Christmas. Are we getting there? Depends where There is, of course. Getting to the end of shopping; getting to the end of decorating; getting (for a few) to the end of fasting and penitence; getting closer to the Nativity; getting closer to New Year’s Eve; getting closer to 2014; getting closer to Epiphany. But is there a There there? What is the fourth candle’s effect on us? 

    There are moments – insomniacs, monks and those on guard duty know them – when dawn has not quite begun, when there is no real light in the East, but when the night no longer smells like night, when there is a strange sense of impending alteration. It is perhaps that sense that our four candles convey. We still need them, to see by, to warm our hands at, to help keep our faith alive and watchful until the Dawn; but the night no longer smells like night, and here and there there is a rustling as of a homeward badger or a waking bird. And so we nod our heads wisely, like the old campaigners we are (or imagine we might be), and murmur, “Getting there”.

And for those for whom Advent, consciously or not, has been a battle on a storm-tossed sea, and who are looking forward to Christmas, or what follows it, or the meaning of it, as a long-desired safe harbour, I’ll add a hymn I wrote last year, to the tune of “Melcombe” (hear it here):

Receive us, Lord, just as we are:

Our wandering feet have led us far

In deserts of the daily round –

Lonely and lost, we would be found.

The songs we sang our lips have lost:

We stand surrounded by a host

Of ghostly troops whose panoplies

Are powdered ash and prancing lies.

Our traitor hearts, each trudging day,

Thoughtlessly throw thy gifts away:

The gifts that meant us only good,

Humble and priceless: paid in blood.

We cannot fight our way to thee

With arms undone by treachery;

Helpless, our torn and ragged soul

Only by thee can be made whole.

Thy love is all we have to trust,

Thy heart more merciful than just

We cling to: we have wandered far –

Receive and free us as we are.