Advent is my favorite season of the liturgical year. The lessons and images of these four weeks preceding Christmas remind us of the countercultural core of this ancient faith—often hidden underneath manifestations of civil religion.
But as much as I love Advent, and how the winter solstice and longest night always fall within it, the language of darkness and light can be troubling. Scriptures such as Isaiah 9:2, “the people who were in darkness have seen a great light,” were originally received by people millennia ago. They lacked our current tendency to group people by skin color and assign value based on that. But we can’t escape that in following centuries many have built on those biblical texts in the Western world, very much shaped by light and dark being associated with invented notions of race. I cringe whenever I hear hymns such as “Longing for light.”
This Advent I’ve been listening to my friend Steve Thorngate’s album After the Longest Night, which includes “The thick darkness where God dwells,” a song drawing from Exodus 20:21. Steve’s lyrics weave in images of life-giving darkness: “The seeds of new birth crave the darkest and liveliest earth. … Learn to trust in the darkness, where our God of mystery dwells.”
Early on in the pandemic, I connected deeply with a section of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. The central group of characters is going through the mines of Moria—all the way through a mountain. They had already tried to go around and found it impossible. Inside the abandoned mines, there is “blank darkness” all around them, beyond which lay “dolven halls and endlessly branching stairs and passages.” Guiding them was the memory of a previous journey by their leader, Gandalf, and his staff, “the light of which just showed the ground before his feet.”
As we continue to move through the pandemic, some information is well-known—vaccines work! Masks worn correctly work! But the uncertainties are leading some to struggle with despair. When I look around at what I can see, I’m tempted to despair as well.
What if hope can be found in what I can’t see? Possibilities lie in the darkness, temporarily shielded from our view. Some of the endlessly branching stairs and passages open up to spacious places. Beneath the ground, some seeds will germinate and others won’t.
If we accept the limits of our vision, it can help us see more clearly what it is possible to see. We can embrace the darkness and mystery, waiting for the plant to sprout, for the path to appear, for the beauty to unfold.
Gathered and Scattered update
This month I am finishing the bulk of my research for my book on the Community of Christ in Washington, D.C. (1965–2016). I have a treasure trove of interview transcripts and scanned copies of archival documents to draw from as I write a book. To allow me to focus on that work, I am going on sabbatical from January 1 to March 31, 2022. This newsletter is going on sabbatical with me. See you all in April—I hope with a completed manuscript.
Reading and listening
Returning from a rare in-person interview the other day, my route had me travel on Jean Baptiste Point DuSable Lake Shore Drive to Ida B. Wells Drive. That evening I read Nate Marshall’s essay on DuSable in Chicago magazine, which examines complex questions around honoring historical black Chicagoans in a city with pressing justice concerns in the present.
Jean Baptiste Point DuSable: Redefining history, by Nate Marshall
As noted above, Steve Thorngate’s album After the Longest Night offers wonderful new music for Advent as well as Christmas and Epiphany. In addition to positive language for darkness, his songwriting incorporates beautiful traditional words such as the O Antiphons while avoiding supersessionism. It’s available as a digital album or CD from his website.