My old neighbour in the village (now gone to meet her Maker)
had a long shapeless skirt and only one visible tooth. Since her husband’s
death she lived alone in a vast crumbling farmhouse with a gorgeous view she
did not, I think, take in. She told me once that every November she would go
into a deep depression. Here in the South of France winters are not usually
severe in the Canadian sense of that word, but they are chill, dank, dark grey
and often rainy. Poor Mme Nouviale was clearly suffering from what we would now
call Sunshine Deprivation Syndrome; but at this time of year many people (in
the Northern Hemisphere at least) feel the cold and the dark in dimensions
beyond the physical.
For some, who still
live the agricultural year, it comes with the slowing down of activity, the
look back over a (frequently unsatisfactory) year of harvests, the anxious
analysis of the accounts; for others, living in cities, there is the pressure
of work, difficult relations in the office, family problems that seem to
intensify as the nights grow longer; for many living alone there is a growing
dread of the dark and the silence.
Although this
unease is often projected onto Christmas, it has little to do with that feast.
It is the primeval dark that makes itself felt to humans no longer attuned to
it. As such, it calls for the cave-dweller in us to stock up with meat and
berries and wood, to light large fires and make loud and joyful noises to drive
away the enormous night. Which is perfectly in tune with Christmas, that
curious half-pagan half-divine festivity.
But those of us to
whom it is also the feast of the Incarnation, that stupendous and overwhelming
surprise, these weeks of darkness leading up to it are more strongly, and
differently, charged. As the readings for today – the first Sunday in Advent –
point out, we are called to be night-watchmen, vigiles as the French say. We know when He came, but we do not know
when He will come again; and Advent celebrates both that past and that future.
If we are to be
good watchers, we must be awake. And so this season is not, as I used to think,
a penitential season so much as a thoughtful and a wakeful one. We need to use
these weeks to awaken our faith, our hope, and our love. Our faith, which does
tend to nod off at times, either through laziness or intellectual incredulity;
our hope, which gets overwhelmed by duties, problems, activities and misery;
and our love, which sometimes disappears beneath a scrum of tangled irritations
and defiant selfishness.
Today is the day of
one candle in the night. ‘It is better to light a candle than to curse the dark’
runs the old proverb. The candle has been lit. The night is no longer whole and
definitive. Hope is awake, just barely, and sleepily stirring its neighbours
Faith and Love. In my little German advent-calendar in the form of a snowy
house, one shutter is open, and on the translucent paper window is written, in
Gothic lettering, ‘Lord, I await Your salvation.’
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