a Great Light
for the people who walked in darkness.
Christmas is coming!
The refrain rings through my thoughts as I listen to the wheels of my suitcase clattering across the airport tile. I am walking while waiting for my plane — pacing, really, from one end of the Salt Lake City airport to the other.
I didn’t foresee how wrecked I would be by the time difference alone, much less the hours of travel and missing my own beloved. (It seems to me that missing someone takes enormous energy all by itself. Can this be true, and if so, is there any way around it?)
There are but few friends I will fly for, and Grace is one of them. Her wedding day was a lovely affair, decked in pine boughs and spiced oranges and bells, and punctuated by the greatest treasure that ever two people can receive — a strong and abiding love. I didn’t cry, but I felt like it. Such beauty and grace. And such change weddings always bring. It’s no wonder people cry.
Now the whirlwind is over, and all that is left between me and my home is the large expanse of the Midwest. Easily crossed by a plane, the journey still feels hard-won. I am so tired I hardly know how I feel. In a week it will be Christmas, but my joie de vivre seems to be missing, and life is looking rather flat.
I’m puzzled at how this can be. After all, I’ve just had the honor to attend my good friend’s wedding. Meeting new people has always filled my cup in the past. Usually I can count on a journey like this to deliver armloads of inspiration, so much I can hardly write fast enough. But my journal is buried in my backpack and my mind feels numb. I keep walking, glancing every now and then at the time on the screens above me.
It’s the 16th day of Advent. Christmas is coming.
The first thing I noticed about Idaho is it gets dark much earlier. One woman I met spent two years in Norway, where they live without much light at all for months. She explained how she observed this to influence the cultural aesthetic, inspiring people to decorate with bright colors, paint their houses red, and light lots of candles. They are cheerful, and they appreciate the darkness for how it reminds them of the power and beauty of light.
This is a correct attitude to have toward darkness, I think.
Here in the Midwest, people love to complain about winter. It does tend to drag on and on in a sort of monotone, until one can easily forget what light and happiness feel like. I grew up in a place where it’s even more gray, even more snowy, and even darker, and I understand. It’s not easy to stay cheerful when the cold drives you indoors and keeps you there, and the land remains cloaked in a somber stillness for days on end.
But in my nonconformist fashion, I love winter. I love her callous refusal to coddle, her simultaneous invitation for warmth and rest. I understand why my ancestors tried their best to simply make it through December. I can see why isolated frontier settlers lost their minds to the gloom. I see the agony, and I revel in it anyway. I would be sad to ever lose the comfortable and contrary companion that is winter, with her long evenings and blankets of stars and stoic ticking clocks.
If not for her, some of us would never rest.
Later, I will fetch some scrap wood from the shop and start my fire.
Every year the Winter Solstice makes me pause and think about the darkness. Usually I must light a fire — a candle will do, but better if it is a proper bonfire, crackling and sparking into the murky sky.
Before I married and moved away, my sisters and I began a loose tradition of attending a solstice walk at a nearby nature preserve. We observed a reverent silence as our guide led us through the dark woods, listening to the soft night sounds and letting our eyes adjust. They served hot chocolate and spiced cider and had a roaring bonfire. Folks were encouraged to write things they wanted to “leave behind” onto pieces of paper, then toss them into the fire, letting go of old fears and old crushes and old bitterness.
The whole affair was rather pagan, and the throw-it-into-the-fire thing didn’t work. But those walks through the forest became something I loved. For me, who had always been afraid of the darkness, embracing it as something necessarily good held great spiritual significance. God made the day, and He made the night. He made the forests, down to the tiniest mycelium that feeds the roots of the trees. He made me to look at what He has made in awe and wonder, and to long for Him, the true Light that casts out darkness.
It seems apt to me that the longest night of the year should come just before we celebrate the birth of the Light of the world. I step outside and bare my face to the cold sky of this empty northern hemisphere, and I yearn for Him more.
When is He coming back?
“Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th,” says my husband, who is not a gnostic or a Scrooge, only practical.
This matters literally not at all to me. So we don’t know the day of the Savior’s birth — we know that He came. He dwelt among us. God sent forth His Son to be our salvation from sin and death and darkness, and to bring us hope. There is no better cause for celebration than this. And no better time to celebrate than now, when it is yet dark.
The table is strewn with Christmas cards when we arrive home late in the night from the airport. Photos of smiling faces, people I love and ache for, sent like intrepid little hugs through the postal service to greet my travel-weary little body. I haven’t sent any Christmas cards yet. I go to bed and sleep a deep sleep until dawn. It’s not magic; it’s just sleep, but it is a good start.
Now it’s the 22nd day of Advent, and I have sent my Christmas cards. There are lumpy brown packages under the tree, but I have already received my gifts. Sleep, yes — bless it. And joy, glad tidings of it. And a cozy little home, with its leaks and creaks, and a dear man to hold me in his arms. The promise fulfilled, and my hope secure. “All this, and heaven too.”
So here is my virtual Christmas card to you, dear reader, a bit harried and jumbled as it is. My sentiments are sincere, though, and please know that I appreciate you all very much. I hope your Christmas season is filled with light, the eternal kind, and that your days are joy-filled and cozy.
Christmas is coming — and I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. I hope you are, too.
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who delt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone. ~ Isaiah 9:2
This was beautiful! I live in Idaho. It especially gets darker early in the winter. I am surprised by it every year.