Advent: 11 December 2022
Good morning,
on the third Sunday of Advent.
As yesterday’s letter was K, we now open the next window to find the letter M. Why? Because of course Christmas means Noel. Here is a window on to the Quad from a CEED office (Centre for Educational Enhancement and Development) which reminded me this week:
Noel is French for Christmas, deriving from the Latin for birthday natalis.
But let’s wait till tomorrow for M, and discover what L really does lie behind our window. It could this morning be for loss – and my commiserations with anybody lamenting World Cup losses yesterday. But in the calendar, L is for… Light. Advent proceeds through shortening days and growing darkness in the northern hemisphere, only turning at the midwinter solstice. Much of our celebration involves light, from Advent candles to fairy lights on trees, from the yule log to the path of light we can walk on the longest night – see https://events.st-andrews.ac.uk/events/walk-a-path-of-light-on-the-longest-night-3/ for details.
What illumination streams from my box of quotations? Well, Tolstoy in Anna Karenina says that All the variety, charm and beauty of life are made up of light and shade. And yet, while we know that, most of us prefer the light to the shade. Another novelist Chinua Achebe writes, Don’t disparage the day that still has an hour of light in its hand. (Anthills of the Savannah) Even as twilight beckons, there is still hope.
Robert Louis Stevenson walked through the Cévennes in southern France and experienced near-complete darkness on occasion. In this passage, he explores the sense that casting light in one area seems to deepen the darkness elsewhere:
I knew well enough where the lantern was; but where were the candles? I groped and groped among the tumbled articles, and, while I was thus groping, suddenly I touched the spirit-lamp. Salvation! This would serve my turn as well. The wind roared unwearyingly among the trees; I could hear the boughs tossing and the leaves churning through half a mile of forest; yet the scene of my encampment was not only as black as the pit, but admirably sheltered. At the second match the wick caught flame. The light was both livid and shifting; but it cut me off from the universe, and doubled the darkness of the surrounding night. (Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes)
Our final text is from Viktor Frankl’s moving memoir of surviving a Nazi concentration camp, Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was Jewish but had a deep understanding of Christian ideas. This passage quotes John 1:5 in Latin and in translation, which sees in the coming of Christ the shining of light in the world.
Another time we were at work in a trench. The dawn was grey around us; grey was the sky above; grey the snow in the pale light of dawn; grey the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces. I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious ‘Yes’ in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. ‘Et lux in tenebris lucent’ – and the light shineth in the darkness.
A candle in St Leonard’s Chapel.
A reminder that all are welcome at services today to reflect on light shining in darkness. 11 am at St Salvator’s Chapel, for a Service of Readings and Music (also livestreamed). And 8.45 pm at St Leonard’s Chapel, for a Service of Nine Lessons and Carols.
Yours,
Donald.