What the Light Was

I read this essay at a church function yesterday afternoon. It's what I've been working on and why I haven't blogged in a while. So I offer it to you, as a way of catching up. And I hope to get back into the habit of regular updates and thoughts after the holidays. To all our families and friends, we love you with all our hearts. You fill our lives with light.

What the Light Was

I grew up in a small town in New Hampshire whose well preserved 18^th century village is nestled at the foot of three small mountains and whose northern borders run directly to the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee. The town smells of pine and cold air. My fondest memories include summers spent at the beach, autumn hikes on trails just beyond our doorstep, and winter skiing five miles away. There are only two times of year you might not want to live there—one is spring mud season, the other is the month of December. In December, there are more hours of darkness than daylight. Situated as we are between mountains at the edge of the Eastern Time zone, the shortest days of the year afford less than nine hours of daylight. The ritual lack of light makes the temperatures drop and stay low, and the winds whipping off the mountains are as cold as a set of lungs can bear to breathe. I remember leaving for school in the dark and coming home in the dark. Pitch is the color of sky by five.

I had forgotten. Until Thanksgiving when I took the dog out one evening just after our kids were in bed. I was only going to the edge of the woods in my parents’ backyard. Since I never use one at home, I didn’t think to grab a flashlight on the way out. (My parents keep a basket of them in their hall closet by the front door.) I hadn’t walked more than twenty feet from the house before I realized my mistake. I couldn’t see the hand in front of my face, much less the puppy at the end of his leash. I had to turn back.

It may be no accident early church leaders chose December 25 as the day we would commemorate the birth of our Savior.  Some say it was intended to replace the pagan winter solstice celebration; others suggest a calendar link between Christ’s conception and his death, placing Christmas nine months after this shared date, emphasizing both creation and redemption, the whole of salvation bound up together.

In any case, Christmas does fall on one of the darkest nights of the year—a tangible reminder of the first verses of the book of John:

 “1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was with God in the beginning. ³ Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴ In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome^[a] it.”

There are few passages in the Bible that I love as much as that one. In the beginning was the Word and the Word is God and the Word is Christ and they are altogether Life and Light, the kind of light that shines in the darkness, the kind of light darkness cannot overcome.

And this is the mark made: I know how fragile is this life we are given, how very brief, how marbled with pain. But I also know of a promise breathed into darkness, a light, a breath so gentle, a power so consuming it takes away the sins of the world.  All.

And there have been dark Christmases—for you, for me: There was the year my mom had cancer and our landlord forced our family of six to move out of our house. There was the Christmas Mark’s cancer spread. There was the year our friends lost their little girl. And there was the season, not long after Christmas, in which our son Kaleb was born, and I cried on a dark morning in a hospital room from the fear of all I knew and all I didn’t.

The handheld TV speaker was next to my ear and I had fallen asleep again in the early morning hours with the television on. And there was a voice before there was sight, and the voice was singing, “It is well, it is well with my soul.” A church service broadcasting in the dim. I remembered that it was Sunday—a redeemed day. I remembered whose story I was really living. And I remembered there is nothing—not a perceived darkness and not even a darkness that is real—that Christ has not already pierced through with light. With grace. The Word, the Promise, the Light made flesh.

Is there any story better?  

I once had a conversation with a dear friend in our first few years of motherhood. “What do you do about Santa?” she asked me.

“Oooo, good question,” I replied, “I guess we’ll do what my parents did with us. We pretend for the fun of it, but we keep the story straight. And then we teach them at a very young age not to say too much out loud in the presence of friends whose parents might handle it differently.”  Because there was that Christmas when my three-year-old sister boldly proclaimed the truth about a waving Santa as he cruised through the mall parking lot atop a fire truck. And the looks my mom got from the parents attending their own sets of wondering eyes were not at all friendly.

 In my mom’s defense, though, the story of Santa does confuse me a bit. A fat man in a red suit somehow trumping the story of God—God!—coming to earth? Maybe Emmanuel, God with us, is just too wonderful. Too amazing. Too strange to bear. And yet, it’s the utter extravagance of the whole thing, the prodigal nature of it, that makes the story what it is—nothing short of the greatest tragedy this world has ever known transformed into its greatest comedy: and that’s Redemption. And that’s the Christmas story. The gift. And we, the so very ordinary inhabitants of this world, we are the receivers of that great gift.

Years ago, my parents’ neighborhood had a tradition of lighting luminaries every Christmas Eve. Each household in The Forest (as it is aptly called) was responsible for its own driveway and part of the road. Just before dark, we’d line white paper bags filled with sand and tea lights from our front door, down our driveway and out to the road. We stopped where our neighbors picked up with their own lights.  The effect, when everyone remembered to do it, was a street through a dark wood dotted with houses and driveways lit only by soft-yellow punctuation marks of light, welcoming in the Christ child, beckoning him to our own front steps. The tradition has since fallen from practice— perhaps because we are all so busy now hosting parties and wrapping gifts, attending services.  Perhaps because most of the neighborhood children have grown and moved away and perhaps, sadly, because so many of us neglect to note the very rich, the very necessary and beautiful story of Christmas—the light that came because the darkness is real.

I must pause in all of the holiday hubbub to remember. This. Often. I must draw my three littles close to whisper words that are true. That the darkness of days is already and for always conquered, that the birth of a baby in a manger is not the beginning of a story, but a point on the rising action of the God-plot: that arch of Creation, Fall, and Redemption.

For when Christ came Emmanuel, the story was well underway, the key player having already created a universe that was good, which now groaned under the weight of all that wasn’t. And it had already been dark for a very long time.  See him enter now—stage left—in his mother’s arms—humble and small, hungry and likely soiled. The breaths of that babe are the very same that breathed all of Creation and you and me into place. The darkness conquered because the Light was Perfect.

Merry Christmas.