To Walk with Saints and Scholars

As Advent begins this year, I find I am just not feeling it. A fairytale-like life change this past year means I find myself living in Ireland – a land of saints and scholars – and far from the pain my friends and family endure right now in the USA. I ought to be full of hope and good cheer, but I find that Advent this year feels…well… complicated.

Advent is a time of waiting in darkness. For weeks, we watch as the light gets more dim and the dark expands. At least for me, the impending darkness feels scarier this year when my most basic sense of what is normal and good does not match the world around me. My homeland is awash in daily ICE raids and political chaos. Europe is reeling from wars and the work of justice. My life here is asking me to surrender to a total lack of Christianity as I understand it and yet find my way nonetheless. So much is unknown right now, and so much is different from how it has ever been before – at least in our lifetimes. So this year, it feels particularly disconcerting to enter a space of ill-informed anticipation. I find I want to resist the usual Advent space of not-knowing, and that makes this Advent feel complicated. Because in the midst of the swirl, Advent asks us to draw inward and stay alert at exactly the same time. It asks us to walk willingly toward darkness and away from the light – toward twilight. I can only hope that twilight has some healing to offer our next.

Twilight is an easy metaphor for liminal space.  It is not day, and it is not night.  Twilight is moving toward the not-knowing instead of moving toward dawn -the knowing and seeing that comes with daylight.  What comes after twilight is complete darkness, and that darkness must be allowed its space. We will, at some point, see a pin prick of light on the horizon.  But for now, we move toward the dark. When we find the courage to trust that light will come, well, that is hope. Hating the waiting, and straining to find the way, well that is the complicated part.

Because willingly walking toward darkness at such baffling times is bewildering! I can’t see clearly, but I am supposed to be happily waiting in hope. Those who wrote Lamentations and I both ask – How? And then I think of the stories from which Advent is birthed. I think of the messages of 2000+ years of Christianity that tell us hope is born as a helpless babe who will be powerless in his lifetime and who will die. Yes, the resurrection is why we are still learning from this story all these years later, but first, there was the waiting for a baby to be born…a baby who would, by virtue of his humanity, die. His mother waited in twilight…knowing darkness would come first….before the light. Twilight. And so I try to sit back, to settle, and to discern what is here before me even without clear vision with which to do so.

Twilight asks my eyes to adjust toward an inability to see clearly.  So then what is better in twilight?  Well, there is no harshness of light. And there is not yet the confusion of total darkness.  I can see shapes, but I can’t see sharp edges or definition. Sure, that can be unsettling, but it can also be a place for ease. It can be a place for rest. I can let my eyes go soft and stop trying to make out the outlines of what things are, where they belong, and what they “ought” to be.

Twilight encourages my settling in and staying put. Humans have fought darkness as a sort of enemy for at least as long as we have been writing histories of our thoughts. These instincts probably make greater sense in a world without artificial means of light and in realities without stable places to be once the sun went down. But our perhaps ancient distaste for the twilight can leave us without a deep teacher of what rest can do to help us reconcile and to heal. Living toward darkness allows us to go still as we discover we cannot move about with ease. We are safest tucked into the space twilight makes for our stillness.

And so I try to rest in this complicated hope.  We don’t have NOTHING at the same time we also don’t have anything.  Nothing is ours yet… or any longer. We see the silhouettes of our skills and potentials.  We see the outline of a road ahead and the shadowy figures of trees and mountains, but we can’t make much out specifically. The truth is that for many of us, the daylight we are leaving was sufficiently bright that we go into the twilight knowing the darkness probably won’t kill us. And it might even have something to offer that we need…or that we could offer others in need.  Advent asks us to trust that after the dark, the dawn will come. But right now, we are called to the rest twilight requires. We are asked to succumb toward the dark because the dark is where all our future selves will be found. The call is complicated by our inability to recognize what we thought would always be there. But the twilight of these days and weeks to come is also the space to unwind and to see only shadows. It is the freedom to not-know the ways we should walk next or fight next or forgive next. It is the wisdom of not-knowing the names of hills, trees, and bodies of water. It is the ease of not-knowing what God wants next.  So now, it is the time for rest.

And we pray rest will restore our complicated hope.