OH DARK DARK DARK

Think dark, think cold. Think, say, the Little Ice Age of the 16-17C. Think deep country. Think farmers, peasants, villages. The harvest – good or bad – is in. It’s late November or early December, the darkest, grimmest time of the year so far. Those who need sunlight to survive emotionally (a malady unrecognized at the time) go into settled depression, like my late neighbour Mme N., a tiny wizened peasant woman with only one front tooth, entirely charming but who found November almost too hard to bear. The fields are white with frost if they are not already under snow. The streams are frozen. Trees are bare and stark against the hard sky. Animals have gone into hibernation, birds have flown South. By late afternoon dark has fallen. On the farm it’s make-and-mend time; the poor try to gather enough straw, twigs and sticks to keep warm in their tumbledown cottages.  In such a world, every culture develops a feast of light. You know from experience that light and warmth and food will return, but it’s hard to keep that in mind from day to day. So the feast of light is a feast of hope as much as of joy. Yul; Hanukka; Christmas.

Most of us know that Christmas is a relatively late feast, created to convert pagan celebrations of the return of light. The pagan roots, of lighting candles, giving presents and eating meals as enormous and as fattening as one can afford, are enduringly present, though more in some cultures than in others. Yet Christmas as a Christian feast never goes away. It is the Christian feast most popular with the “light half-believers of our casual creeds” as Matthew Arnold called those of his own time. And for those trying to live their faith it is always both a joy and a challenge. A joy because it is more than a simple return of daylight that they celebrate; a challenge because they often feel that they are doing it “now/in conditions that seem unpropitious”.

Christmas has Advent preceding it. The first day of Advent is the beginning of the Church’s year. The first of Advent’s four Sundays is marked by one candle. The theme of this Sunday is the darkness: the darkness of the world, the physical but also the moral and spiritual darkness, the darkness as absence and as need. We are urged to ponder the need, to feel it as urgently as we can in our own bones. The darkness will in time be filled by the sign of a Coming that once took place, and that will take place again -- but in a “time not our time”, a time we do not and cannot know. And while that new Coming will happen in the worldly sense unexpectedly, it must not happen unexpectedly to those of us who pray for it. Which is why we need to “watch and wake”, or as the French put it in one word, “veiller”. In the world’s massive dark, we are the nightwatchmen, taking care. By the light of just one little candle we huddle and prepare, making ready for dawn.