A Solstice/Christmas Prayer

This morning as I write, the pure blue-white light of a December morning dispels the night shadows that linger in the bare, dark trees.  My weather app tells me that today will be clear, bright, and seasonally cold.

Each morning that I have been alive on this earth, the same miracle of dawn happens.  How is it, then, that I, like so many of us, spend much of Advent complaining about the early descent of afternoon darkness?

It is a well-known fact that humans prioritize the negative.  We brood over the dark places in our lives.  Often, these are small but painful – slights.  Criticisms.  Small injustices.  We can harbor our wounds with a vengeance.

Sometimes, the dark is life-changing.   Then, no number of successive sunrises can eliminate the pain that comes to define who we are for a time, as we struggle to recover from disintegrating life narratives, find new footing and a path forward.

I have thought a good deal this Advent about what it takes for me to be faithful on a path sometimes lit by a very small seed of light indeed.  I think of Mary and Joseph following the fragile light of their faith along the path to Bethlehem.

Here’s the thing.  In our moments of greatest aliveness, we know that the light isn’t just “out there,” free-floating around the cosmos, for those lucky enough to catch the beams.  We each carry a small but invincible piece of it within us.  It is the essence of who we are as spiritual beings.  And even though that little flame can almost be suffocated by circumstances, as we look back on the darkest nights of our souls, we can see that, however banked, however dim, it did not die.  No matter how life injures us – as it inevitably will – the light of our soul remains.

I have been reading Etty Hillesum this Advent, finding in her response to the Nazi decimation of everything in her life, lessons for our fragile and uncertain now.  Etty writes of the importance of “inner preparation.”   Her words resonate with those of John the Baptist, urging us to “prepare the way.”   They are echoed by the great spiritual teacher, James Finley, who urges us to notice and cherish our small moments of numinous grace and epiphany.  They are not accidents, but gifts, seeds that will sustain us in our darkest passes.

If there is a deep lesson for me this year in the Advent narrative, it is this:  Mary and Joseph’s lives were shattered by the force of God’s presence in ways they could not comprehend, but only submit to.  Life does shatter our narratives, one way or another.  It pitches our habitual strategies, our complacent self-images, into a darkness where we cannot reach them.  We, who have thought of ourselves as “good,” “virtuous,” useful, able adults – must pick up our journeys with little to help us navigate, except the stars, fellow travelers, and, if we are thoughtful, the wisdom of those who have traveled in darkness before us.  This is when we need our inner light the most.

The late, great moral theologian, Jonathan Sacks, writing of Victor Frankl’s lessons from the Holocaust, quotes him:

“It did not really matter what we expected of life, but rather what life expected from us.”

And here, as my prayer going into Christmas, a short excerpt from Etty Hillesum, shortly before her departure for internment at the Westerbork transit camp:

One thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well. Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.

We have a choice.  We can be negative, self-serving, neurotic in our various human needs.  But God offers us more, if we are able to allow the light within to resonate with the light of the world, of which Christmas morning is our enduring icon.  We can do as Etty suggests, and defend God’s dwelling place inside us to the last.

Christmas blessings to you.