Advent Daily Reflection 2020-12-15
1 John 1.4-7
We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.
How hard it is to tell the truth and do what is true! I confess: I was born and walked in darkness most of my non-Christian life; and even now, five years after my baptism, I still walk in darkness. But there’s a difference: I now know when I’m walking in darkness. I can tell the difference. Indeed, darkness is vastly different than light, and hallelujah!
What is the light? Who is it that has no darkness, no shadow? Who is this God made of light, walking in light, containing all? When I walk in the light, I do not become as God is, and yet, as John’s gospel tells us, I can have fellowship with you, my sisters and brothers in Christ, and pray to be washed clean of my many sins.
For me, this walking in the light so that I might have fellowship with you begins with contemplative prayer in the form of poetry writing. I’ve been writing poetry for most of my adult life—but this kind of poetry writing, this “contemplative” writing, is different and has come about very, very recently, after a long absence from any kind of writing, after the aftermath of a family crisis and the death of my aunt from COVID. Also, I’m teaching from home now, and am blessed to have a separate, quiet room at home in which to work, pray and write uninterruptedly.
I wake in the morning and cannot shake the darkness: the fears that have surfaced in my sleep, the afterimages of hospitals and deathbeds, the emotional ingestion of grief and suffering, hunger, homelessness, illness and death taking place every day for millions, corruption and incomprehensible greed at the highest levels of governance, a disregard for our natural home and its creatures. Where is the light? Who shall bring it?
Sometimes I let my fears and doubts—or my paperwork and busywork—have the upper hand, and I persuade myself that entering the light for an hour just isn’t worth it. Sometimes I manage to convince myself that the light is an illusion, and I go about my day—or days—ever so gradually turning back into a machine that churns out projects, products and results and forgets to feel.
Eventually, driven by a sense of emptiness or longing, I return to my writing. I write to God. Sometimes I ask God a question. Sometimes I offer a confession. It hardly matters. There’s a radiance, a presence. A stillness in which God’s closeness is palpable and I feel inseparable from God and you, the bare trees, the snow, the light itself and the vast silence in which God creates everything. Sometimes, God seems to answer:
Advent I
I’d been too busy to pray or write.
Too busy for God.
“Go,” said God. “Get your calendar
and cross out your appointments.
Cross out the names of the months and days.
Tear off the year in its large, heavy type.
What do you have but a series
of empty boxes?
Do you think the soul stays neatly,
first in one, then the other?
Each day is a womb the fetus outgrows.
I stretch to accommodate you—
but imagine deciding to stay small.
There was less than a nanosecond
before creation, before I decided
to share myself
and everything, even you,
yet to be born.”