shadow here, a loss of an hour there. But as the weeks progressed and the hands of time were set forward, an undeniable gloom has settled in and with it, a chill. Things that once flourished in light now lie dormant. We go to sleep in darkness and wake in the same.
To be fair, the night has been coming due for a while now. Those high days of summer when we were carefree and daylight seemed to stretch on forever were always going to exact a price. But the loss of light was so gradual that we didn’t really notice it until we were sitting in darkness. And now, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere find ourselves facing the longest night of the year.
Meteorologically speaking, the winter solstice is easily explained: It is the moment when the Earth’s poles are tilted to their most extreme positions in relationship to the sun, resulting in an exaggerated gap in sunlight between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. While the global South basks in the light of summer, the tilt of our planet’s axis places the North in darkness. The further north you go, the greater the disparity so that Oslo, Norway, will experience only six hours of daylight while Fairbanks, Alaska, will have less than four. Closer to the Arctic Circle, there will be no discernible sunlight at all—full days of darkness for places like Murmansk, Russia, and Utqiagvik, Alaska.
Those are the facts anyway. But the existential reality of the winter solstice is less reasonable and at least for me, deeply portentous. There’s a heaviness to it, and for some, a visceral despair as the loss of sunlight prompts physiological imbalances in the form of Seasonal Affective Disorder As a child, I remember my father speaking of the encroaching night with a sense of reverence and even humility. My father spent most of his day working outside, so for him the loss of daylight meant the loss of working hours and, to some degree, productivity, which in modern life also implies meaning.“The shortest day of the year is coming,” he’d warn as if he were a prophet and it was his solemn duty to prepare us for what was coming.
So like the Earth preparing for winter, I find myself shutting down as darkness descends. It is harder to wake in the morning, and I’m less eager to venture out in the evenings. My mind tells me that I should be active and engaged, fighting against the chill, pushing back the boundaries of the night. Conditioned for productivity and abundance, I flood the house with lights, crank up the heat, and push through. And yet, I also find my body telling me to wait. To accept that there are dark forces beyond myself and that all my energy and efforts cannot stop them from cycling through.
In such moments, I take comfort in the particularly propitious alignment of the winter solstice with the liturgical season of Advent.
At least in the Northern Hemisphere, these weeks gradually bring us to the year’s darkest darkness even as they also deliver us to Christmas. Modern observances often treat Advent as an extension of Christmas, with celebrations and feasting beginning immediately after Thanksgiving, but Christians as far back as the fourth century have prepared for the coming Christ child by sitting in the darkness. Much like the season of Lent, these weeks are for fasting, prayer, and repentance. Strangely enough, we’re supposed to feel unsettled and lost.
In her book length treatment of Advent, Fleming Rutledge puts it more directly:
“Advent is the season that, when properly understood, does not flinch from the darkness that stalks us all in the world. Advent begins in the dark and moves toward the light—but the season should not move too quickly or glibly, lest we fail to acknowledge the depth of the darkness. As our Lord Jesus tells us, unless we see the light of God clearly, what we call light is actually darkness … Advent bids us take a fearless inventory of the darkness without and the darkness within.”
In this way, the Earth may be better attuned to the purposes of darkness than we are. While we insist on revelry and abundance, nature is content to receive such seasons and sit in night. What for us can be the busiest time of the year becomes for her a time of patience and quiet—a time dedicated to the hidden work of decay, the breaking down and dissolution of the past year’s excesses in preparation for future life.
But as much as Advent is a season of darkness, it is also a season of expectation and it is vital that we remember that the night delivers us to the morning.
“Advent” derives from the Latin word, adventus which means “coming” or “arrival.” Something—Someone—is coming and we are waiting for that coming. Christians are waiting for the One whose justice and kindness far outpaces our own. So that even as the shadows lengthen and night descends, even as the things that operate in darkness feel like they grow stronger each moment, hope is not lost. For just as you cannot see the glory of the stars at noonday, it takes the chill of a winter’s night to clarify what is Light and what is Dark. And it is by these same pinpoints of light that we will be guided.
In the final book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien describes such a reality. As the heroes Sam and Frodo are engulfed by the ever-deepening shadows of Mordor:
“…there, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.”
Today, we may sit in darkness, but we wait in hope. Whether you’re feeling the weight of strained relationships, economic pressures, or civil unrest, the invitation of Advent is to know that you are not alone in the darkness. There is a Light beyond us, and that Light is coming to us. So we entrust ourselves, our neighbors, and our world to the God who is Emmanuel–who has and is and will come. And soon we will celebrate.”
- by Hannah Anderson: A Dark Season at Advent
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