The Advent Door

Who Walked in Darkness © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, Christmas Eve: Isaiah 9.2-7

Some years ago, I wrote a prayer for one of my books in which I asked that in those times when we are so focused on providing hospitality to others that we neglect ourselves, God would help us to tend the pilgrim in our own souls “who longs for a welcoming fire and for shelter in the dark.” While the book was in production, I received a note from one of the folks who was working on it, asking me to change that line, as the publishing house avoided the use of language suggesting that darkness was bad.

I understood the concern, being familiar with the ways our culture has long equated lightness and whiteness with goodness, and darkness and blackness with evil. That’s part of what the book was addressing in the first place. With the title Night Visions: Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas, the book was something of a hymn to the deity who dwells in darkness as well as in daylight, the God who challenges us to search and know with all our senses and not just with our eyes, the Holy One who says, “I will give you the treasures of darkness, and riches hidden in secret places” (Isaiah 45.3).

I told the person at the publishing house that, committed though I am to finding the presence of God in the dark, I think it’s fair to want a little light sometimes, and to desire a place of shelter when shadows have fallen across the path.

I think it’s fair to want a LOT of light from time to time. I mean, it’s crazy, what’s asked of us: to live in a world, a cosmos, in which we know so little; to have faith that there is meaning and purpose and a sacred pattern in the chaos; to move forward without being able to see what’s ahead; to follow a God who lives in layers of mystery. It’s nuts for God to ask us to reach beyond our natural instinct toward self-absorption and attend to those around us, to extend hospitality to those who are strangers, to organize ourselves into functioning communities when history has shown us how difficult this is to sustain. How audacious, how wild of God to think we can even begin to do any of this.

And I think God knows this, too, knows how impossible it sometimes seems to live in this world that is strange and difficult as well as wondrous. And so God works to shine some light our way. In this season we celebrate God’s bright impulse in a big way, and with song and story and prayer and ritual we rejoice at the ways that God has illuminated our world. The passage from Isaiah that we read on Christmas Eve gives perhaps the most gorgeous words for what we celebrate on this day:

The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness—
on them has light shined….
For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
and he is named Wonderful Counselor…
Prince of Peace.

The light that Isaiah speaks about: the light that breaks the yoke, the bar, and the rod of the oppressor; the light that consumes the trappings of war; the light that comes in the form of a child of peace: yes, God, more of this light, please.

It’s important to note that the texts that originated with our Jewish forebears, the texts that Christians usually call the Old Testament, can stand on their own. They do not take on meaning for the people of Christ solely by our reading and interpreting them with our Christian eyes. What Isaiah offers here are powerful words for those in darkness in any time, in any place.

At the same time it’s right that we in the Christian tradition find particular hope, solace, and meaning in these words on this day. The vivid, brilliant imagery of Isaiah undergirds and resonates with and gives poetic expression to the images and stories that we receive from the other texts that we hear this week. He prepares us to hear the astonishing story of what has come in the person of Christ. Isaiah reminds us that the longing for light is an ancient human longing. He assures us that in the presence of the darkness of this world—be it friendly darkness or foul—God is present, working to help us know God more clearly and to live together with deeper compassion, justice, and peace.

May the light that we celebrate this Christmas help us to see, to widen our vision to all the ways that God shows up in darkness and in the day. When you have need of it, may you find a welcoming fire and shelter in the shadows, and may we offer these in turn. Blessings to you on this Christmas Eve and all the days—and nights—to come.

[To use this image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]

Image: Raising the Ruins © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, Advent 3: Isaiah 61.1-4, 8-11

They shall build up the ancient ruins,
they shall raise up the former devastations.
—Isaiah 61.4

When I made my trip to Rome several years ago, one of the things that fascinated me was the presence of ruins. The Eternal City offers a layered landscape; everywhere we went, the strata of history were visible to us. Past and present inhabit the terrain as companions. I had more than one occasion to wander around the Forum, where there’s a particularly high concentration of ancient ruins: basilicas, triumphal arches, temples of gods and goddesses, the House of the Vestal Virgins.

I’ve been mentally revisiting those ruins as I’ve contemplated this week’s passage from Isaiah 61. The text overwhelms with its imagery of repair and restoration; the author lavishes the reader with his stunning litany that lists the ways that God will bring healing and release to those in captivity of various kinds. To those who have lived with imprisonment, oppression, and grief, the writer offers a prophecy of how they will receive garlands instead of ashes, the oil of gladness, the mantle of praise. He tells of how God has garbed him with the garments of salvation and covered him with a robe of righteousness like a bridegroom decked with a garland, like a bride who adorns herself with jewels. There is further visual fare: “For as the earth brings forth its shoots,” he exults, “and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before the nations.”

In the midst of this dizzying litany, the writer tells of how those whom God heals and frees “shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations.” It was this image, amongst the many that he drenches us with, to which I kept returning as I pondered this passage. And it was the Roman ruins that I thought of, those leavings that persist in the present landscape, reminding their visitors of what has gone before.

I wonder what it does to a person’s psyche to live in a place that’s old enough to have ruins, how it is to be perpetually reminded that we humans are part of a pattern of history. And I wonder what it does to a psyche, and to a soul, to live in a landscape that is largely devoid of ruins—in the typical sense of them, at least—as those of us living in the United States largely do. The absence of ruins makes it more challenging to remember how we inhabit our history, and to recognize and reckon with what haunts us. The ruins we do have, we tend to hide: the burned-out buildings, the falling-down dwellings, the places not considered worth building up. We route traffic around them, or sometimes construct walls along the freeways so those who pass by don’t have to see them.

It’s easy to become romantic about ruins when they are ancient, when they are lovely, and when we have a less immediate sense of the events that brought about their ruination. In the absence of really knowing those who first lived among them, it’s tempting to project our own ideas and imaginings onto what is left behind and to smooth away the sharp edges of memory. Largely removed from the visible past, we don’t have to wrestle with it so much.

But there are plenty of ruins that we carry inside, individually and collectively. It’s sometimes harder to see them, more difficult to discern the interior terrain of people and families and communities and churches marked by loss, abandonment, struggle, private battles, migration.

What does it mean to rebuild those ruins? When it comes to the losses and devastations that we harbor within us, how do we discern what God might be inviting us to restore?

Rebuilding a ruin, literal or metaphorical, doesn’t allow for much nostalgia. Doing the work of restoration—redeeming a place instead of living with its remnants—gives us little room to hold on to the way things were, or how we thought they were. Reclaiming a ruin—tangible, intangible—challenges us to go into the rubble and to see clearly what yet remains: to discern what is yet solid, to find walls that can bear weight, to sort through the debris and retrieve what we can use. Rebuilding a ruin calls upon our imagination in a deeper, sharper way that romanticizing it does. To restore what has been destroyed, we have to resist seeing the landscape only the way it was, and learn to imagine what is possible now.

Isaiah has gotten me thinking about what has fallen into ruin in my life, and what God might be inviting me to rebuild. How about you? Is there a broken relationship, an abandoned project, a dream you left behind? How do you discern where God might be calling you to begin the work of restoration? Not all ruins are meant for redemption, after all; some are best to flee. How do we tell the difference? What helps us see the ruins clearly and to resist the hazards they may hold: the overabundance of nostalgia that keeps us from imagining what is yet possible in that place (or some better place), or the enchantments that deter us from moving on, or the pain that clouds our vision?

Luke tells us in his Gospel that when Jesus got up to speak in the synagogue, he opened the scroll to this passage from Isaiah and, after reading it, told his hearers that on this day, the scripture had been fulfilled (Luke 4.16-30). In this season and beyond, may you know the presence of the one who came as the embodiment of redemption and restoration. Blessings.

[To use the image “Raising the Ruins,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]