The Ven. Richard I Cluett
It's dark these days. It's dark when I wake up about 6:00 in the morning, and it is dark on those rare days I get home at 6:00 in the evening. Some days it is even dark all day long. Those are the days with the heavy leaden, gray skies. No rain, no snow...just dark gray days. Advent takes place in a time that is cold and dark.
Not only the meteorological environment is dark, so is the human one, too. The evening news is full of stories about the natural disasters afflicting humanity. The news, too, is full of stories of human disasters political disasters and diplomatic disasters, both potential and actual. Israel, Palestine, Iraq, the Sudan Afghanistan, Mumbai. The horizon dark gray with possibilities for terrorism. People of the world living in cold terror, their futures dark with the potential for destruction.
The City of New York is sheltering on cold nights more than ten thousand homeless souls. Bethlehem and Allentown and Easton are sheltering more than ever. Food kitchens are feeding more people than ever and more families than ever. Volunteer resources seem to be drying up though. Some neighborhoods are tired of having all those depressing people hanging around all the time. It seems to be going on forever and ever.
Many, too many people live in the cold and the dark. The hearts of others are being turned cold and dark because they are tired and the need never seems to diminish, only increase. It’s Advent.
In this litany, let me mention one more condition of our time, which is that so many of us seem to be in a perpetual "long dark night of the soul." People who are questioning the meaning, value, purpose of their lives. Nothing ahead but more of the same. Futures dark because of past expectations unfulfilled. We live in biblical times.
The fear of the dark begins in early childhood. The child who is afraid of the dark used to be you and me. Afraid of the creak in the floor, afraid of the shadow on the wall, afraid of the nameless faceless one who could come through the window, afraid of the shapeless thing that might be looming in the closet.
My son Tyler as a very little boy went to bed with a volleyball. For months. He said it kept the elephants away. And you know, he was right. Not one elephant came by in the night the whole time he slept with that volleyball.
We grow up. We learn not to be afraid of the dark. We learn that fear is seen as a sign of weakness, so we don’t speak out loud of our fears…even to ourselves. Of course, it is an untruth to say that we have no fears.
There is in most of us some darkness that casts a chill, a shadow onto our adult heart. The telephone ringing at 2 a.m. Fear of the day that the body being lowered into the ground belongs to the one we can’t live without.
We fear being old without the strength or the will to protest being left alone all day in front of a flickering television. We fear being at the mercy of medical machines.
We are afraid of loss, of helplessness, of old age, of abandonment, of adult kinds of dark. Advent begins in the dark.
I once knew a woman who was beautiful, witty, intelligent, with a devoted husband, two fine children and a lovely home, who was so paralyzed by fear that she could not get out of bed in the morning.
I once new a man at the top of his profession – doors were opened for him, drinks poured for him, Wall Street bowed to him, women admired him, men feared him. Yet his life was so stunted that he could count on no one but himself as he was faced with the issues of life and health that come to us all.
In his address accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Isaac Bashevis Singer said, “No technological achievement can mitigate the disappointments of modern man… his loneliness, his feeling of inferiority, and his fear of war, revolution and terror.”
Meg Greenfield once wrote in Newsweek magazine, “…The desire to follow a charismatic leader, the blindness to evidence that our heroes may be weak…the fantasy of escape into another place… the contained yet real promptings to violence that we have all felt. These are not the vices of some cult. They are the dark impulses that lurk in every psyche…”
Advent takes place in the dark – darkness without and darkness within; the fear of darkness and the darkness of fear.
It was into a real world that John came testifying to light that he saw coming into this dark world. Jesus. It was into the fullness of human life and experience that God came.
And it is only in the reality that is human experience, our experience that we can hear, appreciate, accept, and respond to this incredible act of God that we prepare to celebrate in the Advent season.
If we confine Jesus to the warm glow of a stable birth surrounded by family, shepherds, wise men, lowing cattle; then we will never know, truly, what this birth means to the world, and can mean to you and me. It is in the shadows and darkness of human experience that God would make his presence known to us.
One of the collects following the Prayers of the People says of God, "Almighty God, to whom our needs are known before we ask..." God knows. AND it is through the Incarnation...the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus that we know that God knows. God knows what it’s really like, knows what we really are going through in our lives, knows how much we need to know his presence with us, knows how much we need the assurance of His love and His future.
One of the Eucharistic prayers points out this common bond we have with all humanity when the priest says, “joining with the heavenly chorus, with prophets, apostles, and martyrs, and with all those in every generation who have looked to you in hope..."
It is a paradox that the darkness of human experience is penetrated by the tiniest of lights. Night hovers over Advent, as it hovers over human experience. The coming of the light reveals just how dark the night can be, and it also reveals how powerful that light is. It has prevailed against all the powers of darkness. The light continues to shine, and no darkness – no darkness of any kind – shall overcome it.
