Advent Week 1: Hope

As the winter solstice approaches, I would swear to you shortly after sunset each evening that it is actually 10 p.m. The darkness is so thorough, so present, it seems it has always been. This year the early evening darkness feels so encompassing I feel as if I’ve been carried back to the womb and can’t see my way out. Then again, that is how all of 2025 has felt to me.

In Genesis, God says, let there be light, so in regard to the chicken and egg of existential illumination, we know that dark was first —— that darkness is the underlying reality of all creation. Somehow this thought is genuine comfort.

Today is the first day of Advent, and here I am, waiting for the light, which is what Advent is all about. In the church where I spent my teen years, every Christmas Eve there was a reading of John 1, and that is where it says this: The light shines in the dark and the darkness has not understood it.

How does dark not understand the light? Maybe because it disappears when the light arrives?

When I enter a dark room, I reach for the light switch. I don’t so much understand light as I live and navigate in its existence. In November, at 6:30 p.m. standard time, I know darkness —— the kind that requires me to plug in the twinkle lights and turn on all the lamps. But this whole year or more, I have known another darkness —— of grief, confusion, a loss of momentum and purpose, a lack of clarity, a dimming of hope. My perception and vision seem blinded by a profound lack of illumination.

What I am considering as Advent begins is that maybe I need to expend less effort fighting for understanding. Maybe I need to make peace with the brooding dark spaces where newness is birthed. I wonder how many of us are feeling the weight of a dark season, who are waiting for a shift the way the people of Israel waited for a Messiah. They endured silence from the prophets for four hundred years before the birth of the savior. I say this not to minimize the inherent pain of waiting or darkness; I am simply reminding us that darkness has its place. That darkness came first. That light has meaning because it IS dark.

It was into darkness that Jesus was born. That’s what the prophet Isaiah foretold, and that is what is sung so powerfully in Handel’s Messiah: “For, behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. And the Gentiles shall come to the light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.”

If you feel hemmed in by all that is not, all you do not know, welcome. You are not alone. You are actually having the most human of experiences; I am too.

Sometime during this first week of Advent, I invite you to light a candle and call it Hope. You don’t have to feel hope or have hope. Just know that light and hope are things that exist, even if they don’t exist inside of you right now. But before you strike the match, remember that the Creating Spirit hovered over “a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness, and spoke, ‘Light.’” Dark is good. It’s the place where the light gets turned on.

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For the season of Advent, I’ll be sending a weekly newsletter. I’d love to hear from you about what Advent, the holiday season, or the winding down of 2025 means to you. I welcome your comments and emails. Peace to you, my friends.