Advent: In a Dark Time the Eyes Begin to See

Twice a week I sit in shared meditation, in the dark, with friends. The silence is lit by three simple candles. One of the things I love about the time, early in the morning, is that during the weeks of November and December we begin in darkness, as the silence ends we remain in the dark and then as we share where we are personally at spiritually the sun rises and the day begins. At the end of the hour our space is fully lit by sunlit. I love this time and space as we move from darkness, to half-light, to full light. It is a gentle transition from one spiritual space into another, without physically moving.

There is another time in the week when I do something similar, only it ends very differently. There is not the same transition from darkness into light. As the time ends the lights are switched on and I find the transition from darkness to light, a little shocking. There is no in-between space as we move suddenly from darkness into bright, shocking neon light.

We are approaching the darkest time of the year as we head towards the Winter Solstice, closely followed by the coming of the light that is Christmas. Today is Advent Sunday, the day that marks the beginning of the days leading to the coming of the new light, that is Christmas.

Advent is a time for waiting, a time of preparation. A time set aside to wait for the “coming” of Love in human form symbolised in the birth of the Christ child. A promise of what love can become if we let it grow and nurture in our hearts and lives. For every new life is the gift of promise and possibility. A gift of possibility that can be reborn in each of our lives if we allow it to be.

Advent is a season of preparation and it cannot be rushed. It requires patience. We cannot wish the days away, we cannot wish the winter away. We have to wait patiently, but not passively. We have to adjust ourselves to the coming light. If it was to come all at once, it would be too much for us. Let us not wish away the darkness of winter and look forward too desperately to the future, for what is yet to come. Let us adjust to the limited light we have been given, just enough to take the next step.

We impatient people, we who live by neon light and instant gratification do not like the dark and certainly know little about patience, about waiting. If you don’t believe me just watch yourself the next time your computer freezes when you’re trying to watch a clip on YouTube. We want it all and we want it now. We also want it all in bright lights, with bells on. We certainly don’t want to have to go through the hardships to take us there.

Yes Advent is about the coming of the light, but not something sudden and dazzling, more a journey from darkness into natural light. This is the classic spiritual journey. This is the beauty of the holy month of December. I experience this powerfully in that dark silky silence of early morning, when the frosty winds make all moan. I revere this dark, cold, humbling time that leads to the coming of the light. I have noticed these last few years that if I don’t rush and push my way through this time, If I allow myself to savour it, something shifts deep within me if I allow myself to truly embrace the darkness. Somewhere between Solstice and New Year, probably on Christmas Day, some new light comes into my vision, but not suddenly. Like most good things in life, slowly it rises. It is coming. This is Advent, the coming of the new light. If we allow it to it will work its magic and something new will grow within each and every one of us.

We are afraid of the dark though aren’t we. We want to rush through these weeks and force the light, we people born in neon times. We impatient and expectant folk. The truth is though that in order for us to truly appreciate the light we must first know the dark. Brings to mind those beautiful words from Isaiah chapter 9 verse 2 “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness-on them light shines.”

Now of course the very same light shines on us all, it’s just that we don’t always notice it. We only really notice it when we are in the deep darkness. I saw a beautiful example of this during the last singing meditation I experienced. I always light a hundred candles as we sit together in the dark. The candles are meant to light what we are engaging in, to allow those present to read the words we sing around. Now usually I leave the kitchen door open which adds a little artificial light. I now realise how much this has been a mistake. Last week I didn’t and do you know what the room seemed even more illuminated. The candles burned ever more brightly in the darkened room. The light shone even more brightly on we that were singing and sharing silence in deep, deep darkness.

We need to honour the darkness in order for us to truly rejoice in the light, when the moment of magic comes.

But first we must know the dark, we must learn the patience of sitting in the dark. This brings to mind that beautiful short poem “Know the dark” by Wendell Berry

“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”

But we don’t want to know the dark, we want to walk in the light. Often we spiritually inclined do not want to look at the darkness, we only want the light. Who really wants to take the time to look at the darkness within ourselves and within our world? The truth is of course that if you refuse to look at the dark, to shine a little light on it, is to truly live in the dark; this is a life without joy, this is not truly living in life. We need to bear witness to all life, to hold life with a steady gaze, to live spiritually alive.

In order to live spiritually alive we need to see life in its fullness. We need to practice holding an unwavering gaze in the dark to not look away or to flush it out with neon light, one that is far too bright.

You see as Roethke said: “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.”

I am learning to surrender to a more natural light, to the dark. I am learning to allow my eyes to adjust to the whole of reality. I need to do so to truly embrace the beauty of the dark. This includes the lingering darkness within myself that leads me to still reject and to turn away from some aspects of life.

I am slowly learning to follow those words of Wendell Berry

"To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is travelled by dark feet and dark wings"

I am learning the lessons of the darkness and during these Advent days I will not be waiting passively for the coming of the light. Instead I will appreciate these dark days, shed some gentle light on the dark places within myself, my life and this our shared world, so that when the moment of magic comes I can become a child of the light and become a light for others. This is what we are here waiting for. To be a light to others who may be struggling in their own dark times. We can light the way. This brings to mind the following beautiful words by Mary Oliver “The Buddha’s last Instructions”

The Buddha’s Last Instruction
by Mary Oliver

“Make of yourself a light”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal—a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire—
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

So let’s prepare ourselves for the moment of magic yet to come. Let’s nurture the love within us and prepare to give birth to it in lives. Let’s not wish these dark cold days away. There is a beautiful gift in them if we allow ourselves to fully experience them. We need to experience each and every sensation of this season. We need to not fear the dark, we need to know it and fully embrace it. And when the time comes to once again give birth to the new light.

Amen

Advent: Travelling Light & Travelling Dark

A man was walking home late one night when he saw the Mulla Nasrudin searching under a street light on hands and knees for something on the ground. "Mulla, what have you lost?" he asked.

"The key to my house," Nasrudin said.

"I'll help you look," the man said.

Soon, both men were down on their knees, looking for the key.

After a number of minutes, the man asked, "Where exactly did you drop it?" Nasrudin waved his arm back toward the darkness. "Over there, in my house." The first man jumped up. "Then why are you looking for it here?"

"Because there is more light here than inside my house."

I love cold dark Tuesday mornings at this time of the year. That may sound like an odd thing to say, but I do love Tuesday mornings at this time of the year. Every Tuesday morning I attend a shared meditation. It begins at 7am in total darkness. Myself and others sit in silence and darkness and after a while we share one by one as the light begins to appear. By the time the hour is up, so is the sun and we go out into the world and back into the light and life. This Tuesday morning gathering is vital to my personal spiritual connection, it feeds me in ways I will probably never fully understand.

This week during the hour the phrase “travelling light” began to float around in the soul of the group and in me. “Travelling light” is one of those interesting phrases that can have several meanings.

When I heard the phrase the first thought that came into my mind was the idea of travelling without too many belongings. I remember a friend once recounting his many pilgrimages along “Camino de Santiago” and how on this beautiful and spiritual journey it was essential to travel with few physical belongings, he also told how through the journey he left behind things that had been holding him back spiritually in some way. He travelled light.

“Travelling Light” also makes me think of the need to tread carefully through life, to live but to do so without causing harm. To step lightly like a Jain monk might do…”Step lightly, stay free” as Mick Jones once sang.

"Travelling Light" also brings an image of a light that travels itself, that might move across the skyline.

“Travelling Light” also brings another image to mind. A light by which the wanderer and journeyer may travel by. A loving light that guides, holds and sustains them through what may trouble them as they wander through life.

And then my thoughts turned to the opposite of “Travelling Light”, it brought to mind the phrase “Travelling Dark”, which happened to be the title of an album by “The Palledino’s” who my brother had once played and toured all over America with. I am sure we have all spent time travelling, feeling lost at times in the dark. We ought not fear this you know. We need the dark just as much as the light. The dark allows us to prepare for the light, to be still and silent and to truly take root in the light. Sometimes it is the dark where the keys are to be found and not where the light is shining.

We should not be afraid of the dark times of life, of our being. They are a part of life just as much as the light. Rainer Maria once wrote:

“I Love the dark hours of my being” by Rainer Maria Rilke

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that's wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:

a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.

Sometimes it is the in the darkness that life’s riches are discovered. Sometimes we need to journey in the dark and sometimes we need to carry our past with us and draw on the riches that were sown and planted their, that have yet to be harvested. There is a time and a place for everything under the sun. Or should it be under the moon?

Today the season of Advent officially begins. Yes I know Christmas seems to have begun very early this year. As soon as the Halloween masks were put away or the final bonfires went out on firework’s night” Christmas seemingly began. I don’t really like it you know. I love the Christmas season and the spirit that lies within it, so rich in spiritual meaning, the problem I have is that we let the light in or perhaps out too early and as a result it loses some of its magic. We need to wait for the moment of magic, we need to be patient, we need to prepare ourselves so it can fill our spirits properly and we can carry its light into our wounded and ever wounding world. By golly it needs it. We need to be ready for Christmas and this requires preparation. Thus the need to truly experience Advent.

The word “Advent” is derived from the Latin “Adventus”which means “coming”. It is a time for waiting; waiting in anticipation and hope. It is also a time for preparation. A quiet time when we are meant to patiently wait for the coming of a new light in the darkness.

Christianity teaches that 2,000 years ago angels heralded the news of a child who would be born who would save humanity. Prophets had prophesised this and wise sages and humble shepherds journeyed to great him. The wise sages travelled from afar following a star. This was their “travelling light”. There journey was not an overnight one, it took patience and time and did not end until what we would call the 12th day of Christmas, what is known as the Feast Day of Epiphany, or so the story goes.

 Christmas does not actually begin in early November regardless of what the shops and tv schedules claim, it actually begins on sunset on 24th of December. What we enter now is the period of anticipation and preparation that is Advent. A time that asks us to wait, a time that requires patience. A time when we need to allow the love that is the core of the Christmas “Mythos” to form in our hearts and to be born again in our lives and made manifest in our actions.

Advent is a beautiful reminder that the hope of all of humanity is reborn and renewed each night a child is born. For as Sophia Lyon Fah’s so beautifully put it “Every night a child is born is a holy night”. Advent is an invitation for every one of us to be both the child and traveller the prophet and the promise of what might yet be. Advent is the time to prepare ourselves spiritually to journey within and become the blessing of hope that we all need. That hope though needs time to form within our souls, so it can come to birth again in our every feeling, every thought, every word and every deed.

It is vital that we prepare ourselves and nurture that wonderful light that burns within each of us.

Advent is a time for waiting for allowing all that we have known and perhaps will ever know to come together at once. It’s a time to bring all the love we have known in our lives to form fully in our souls and to let it become one. This is by no means a passive time, although we so often see waiting in this way. It is not just about standing or sitting around it is also about bearing witness to what has been and to the world in which we presently find ourselves. Margaret Kirk highlights this in her meditation “Waiting” in “Hearts and Mind” she states

“…the word “wait” has a number of different roots. One of these roots is from the old French word “waitier”, which means to watch as well as to wait. Another is from the Old High German “wahta”, meaning watcher and “wahhon”, meaning to be awake. So quite deeply embedded in the meaning of our English word “wait” is the suggestion that however powerless we might feel, waiting brings with it an awakening…if we allow it to.”

This is what I will be doing as I enter this season of Advent and it will be what I am suggesting to those I serve and all I meet, to prepare and to wait, but to do so in a watchful and wakeful sense. To take time to look over the lives we have lived and the world in which we live today. To examine our whole lives, both the light and the dark. To take time in the dark and prepare ourselves fully to open up to what has been, what is now and what might just be; to find the light that we can travel and live by and to not only follow that which is beyond us but open ourselves fully to it and invite it to grow within and through us and to wander on.

Let us wander on, not alone, but together in harmony with all that has been and all that will ever be.

We are here for a reason…each and every one of us…that reason I believe is to be bearers of the light in our world…to bring hope to our world…so let us become the light of the world…Let us manifest hope in our hearts, minds and souls, let us become the hope of the world…


I'm going to end this little chip of a blogspot with the following by Kathleen McTigue...


“On the Cusp of Winter” by Kathleen McTigue


We’ve come to the season of waiting.

The colors of autumn are gone,

leaves faded and fallen, and branches rise bare to sky.

The deep quiet and frozen beauty of winter are coming

but not quite yet: we are in the season in between.



The world closes in on itself as breathing things

hunker down, burrow in, drop to the bottom

and store up nurture for the long cold.



Animals that we are, we feel in our bones

the shuttering of the windows.

Though freed from the need to burrow in,

may we still find guidance

in the rhythm that beats through our hearts.



In this season of waiting, may we let ourselves

slow down our pace,

ease out from beneath the burden of our speed

and bustle, our fretful worry

so that gratitude can saturate our days and colour our nights.



In this season of closing down, closing in,

may our hearts stay open,

Urging open our doors to the stranger,

our hands to the helpless,

And our spirit to all that calls us endlessly back to life.

The trees in winter

I was travelling through the Derbyshire hills the other day, on my way to the Nightingale centre at Great Hucklow. I spent most of the journey simply staring out of the window and taking in the beautiful winter scene. The fields were white with snow and sheep. I also noticed the lonely winter trees, stretching out from cold pale ground.

There is something very beautiful about the trees in winter. These lifeless stick like sculptures stretching out from the ground are stripped right down to the bone. They look vulnerable and exposed, but they are not. By next spring life will have returned and I know this scene will be very different. If I travel this way then I will see the new lambs and the rolling fields, separated by dry stone walls and the trees will once again be bursting into life.

I am enjoying this winter, I have a new found sense of appreciation for it today. This is because I am able to empathise with it. I feel that I have been stripped of some unwanted and unneeded skin these last few weeks; I feel that some of those barriers that block me from life, from love, from God have been removed; I feel that I have been opened up once again. Now some may see this as making myself vulnerable, well I have no problem with that. Life is a vulnerable experience; you cannot be protected from it. Actually by trying to protect myself from life is to actually live in fear and I do not believe that this is living at all. I know that my attempts to protect myself in the past have only ever made me feel increasingly lonelier and cut off. I need to feel the cold this winter, to truly experience it. I need to feel bare and stripped at times because I know by doing so I am preparing myself for the new birth of the new year and the coming of spring; I need to prepare myself for the pink snow that I use to see falling from the cherry blossom in the courtyard at Luther King House. But first I must feel the cold and not fear it. It’s funny I don’t seem to mind the cold this winter, in fact I’m actually enjoying the fact that I can feel it. I know that I am alive and by golly do I want to be alive.

I have been talking an awful lot about the coming of light these past few weeks, this is of course in celebration and appreciation of Advent. I have also talked about darkness and the “ache of loneliness”. Well now I am beginning to question myself. Is the dark all bad? Should we fear it? I am not wholly convinced that we should, it has its place in the circle of life, just as much as the light. The winter Solstice will soon be upon us. This year (2011) it will fall on the 22^nd December. This is the shortest day of the year, in terms of daylight hours of course. Every day last 24 hours, obviously. This shortest day marks the end of the descent into darkness and the beginning of the new light.

In Hinduism, which has recently celebrated its own festival of lights, the Deity most associated with darkness is Kali. On the surface she is seen as destructive, she drinks blood and wears a chain of skulls. Seen literally she would have to be viewed as monstrous and terrifying. This though is not what this icon is about, at all. There is something much deeper going on in the imagery. It is a mistake to get lost in the metaphor, this is true of all religious symbolism by the way. “Kali” in Sanskrit is the feminine word for time. In time we all die, it is a fate that cannot be avoided, no matter how clever we think we are. She is black, not because there are racial undertones here but because death is a mystery; we cannot know what will happen to us when we die. Kali represents the mystery of life and death and the continuing cyclical relationship between the two.

This is an image that seems particularly pertinent during the winter when everything has died off. The ground is hard and the trees are bare and generally speaking people’s moods seem a little lower. This though is not something that we should fear, in fact perhaps it should be celebrated. Everything that lives and grows, including we humans, needs to lie fallow for periods of time. We need this because we need to rest and regenerate. The leaves that fell from the trees in the autumn are now regenerating in the soil. By spring this will lead to new life. It is the death of these leaves that actually makes new life possible.

We need not fear the dark it is both regenerative and nurturing. Darkness symbolises the holy, just as much as the light. There can be no Easter without Good Friday. To ignore the darkness or to try and flee from is to ignore elements of the Divine revelation in life itself. There is nothing in life that is beyond the range and reach of God. These words from Psalm 139 always come to my mind when I think of darkness and light.

⁷ Where can I go from your spirit?

   Or where can I flee from your presence? 

⁸ If I ascend to heaven, you are there;

   if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. 

⁹ If I take the wings of the morning

   and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, 

¹⁰ even there your hand shall lead me,

   and your right hand shall hold me fast. 

¹¹ If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,

   and the light around me become night’, 

¹² even the darkness is not dark to you;

   the night is as bright as the day,

   for darkness is as light to you. 

Advent truly is the season of darkness and light. Both of these qualities offer vital religious insights and both are worthy of our reflection during this sacred season. In the symbol of Yin and Yang, we see clearly the relationship between the light and dark. Where the whiteness of Yin is most dominant we see the seeds of Yang emerging and where Yang is more dominant we see Yin emerging. You see the light and dark give way to one another, they complement each other. You cannot have one without the other. Neither is beyond the reach of the Divine either, for they are both a like to this universal love. I do not believe that God would reject anything or anyone. This is not the way of love.

This year I am learning to appreciate the cold bareness of winter. Yes I am celebrating the coming of new hope and light, but not by ignoring the dark. I need the dark, I need to be stripped bare at times, I need to lose this skin that sometimes I feel so imprisoned in. I need to let the new life within me spring into being and thus allow my soul's recycle to continue.

I now understand how important it is to really feel the cold at times.