The Longest Night of the Year

The darkness has been gathering for a while now. It wasn’t particularly obvious at first—a lengthening
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

 

A Christmas Message for the Post-Christian

C.S. Lewis once pointed out that Christianity does not begin by telling us how to behave, but by telling us
what is wrong.

There is a particular kind of person who feels most irritated by Christmas. Not the outright unbeliever, not the pagan who senses a mystery he cannot name, but the one who has already “been there.” The post-Christian knows the story. They know the carols, the manger, the angels. They have opinions about it all. They have moved on.

Or so they think.

This is the person C.S. Lewis had in mind in “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans” when he spoke of those who are sick and do not know it. Not because they are immoral, or foolish, or uniquely corrupt, but because they have lost the ability to feel their need. They once heard the diagnosis and now believe themselves immune.

The post-Christian does not usually say, “I reject Christ.” They say something softer and far more dangerous. They say, “I know all that already.” They believe the faith has been outgrown, like a childhood coat. They remember the rules more clearly than the mercy, the prohibitions more clearly than the promise. And so they assume the cure was nothing more than a moral program they have since replaced with something more flexible, more adult, and more reasonable.

Christmas arrives and irritates them because it refuses to stay in the past. It insists on returning every year like an unanswered question. Lights go up. Songs drift through grocery stores. Old words reappear. “Prepare the way.” “Watch.” “Wake.” The post-Christian tells themselves it is nostalgia, or marketing, or cultural debris. But something underneath them stirs anyway.

Lewis once pointed out that Christianity does not begin by telling us how to behave, but by telling us what is wrong. That is precisely what the post-Christian resists. They do not want to be told they are unwell. They prefer to believe the trouble lies elsewhere. In systems, structures, history, bad actors, anything but the human heart.

So they trade sin for psychology, repentance for self-expression, forgiveness for explanation. They learn to narrate themselves endlessly. They understand their wounds. They trace them carefully. They name every fracture in the family tree. And still the ache remains.

This is the quiet irony of the post-Christian life. They have thrown off guilt, yet cannot find rest. They have rejected judgment, yet live under constant accusation. They have abandoned absolution, yet they continue to rehearse their failures in their heads. They have learned all the language of healing except the one thing that actually heals.

Christmas does not argue with them. It does not try to win them back by force. It simply stands there and tells the old story again, slowly, stubbornly, like a bell that refuses to stop ringing.

It says the problem is not that you lacked information. The problem is not that you failed to try hard enough. The problem is not that you grew up in a bad church or heard the faith poorly explained. The problem is older, deeper, and far less flattering.

The world is sick. And so are you.

Lewis was blunt about this. He insisted that Christianity only makes sense if something has gone seriously wrong. Not slightly wrong. Not inconveniently wrong. Fatally wrong. Christmas dares to say the same thing without raising its voice.

The post-Christian bristles. They do not want a savior. They want a solution. 

It tells us that no amount of education, therapy, reform, or self-curation can mend what is broken at the root. It tells us the reason we cannot save ourselves is not that we have not yet discovered the right method, but because we are the problem we keep trying to solve.

This is where the post-Christian bristles. They do not want a savior. They want a solution. They want improvement, not resurrection. They want Christmas without the confession that makes Christmas necessary.

But Christmas refuses that bargain.

It insists that the cure comes from outside us. That help does not rise from within. That the center of the story is not human potential but divine interruption. A God who does not wait for us to climb toward him, but comes down into our confusion, our fatigue, our self-justifications, our well-polished unbelief.

This is why the incarnation offends modern ears. A teacher we can admire. A moral example we can adapt. A spiritual insight we can integrate. But a God who enters the world as a child because we cannot rescue ourselves? That is harder to dismiss and harder still to accept.

Christianity insists, stubbornly and repeatedly, that something had to die before anything could live.

Christmas does not shout this. It whispers it. Candles instead of spotlights. Silence instead of spectacle. A pregnant pause in the year that asks one uncomfortable question: What if you were wrong about what you needed?

Not wrong in the sense of ignorant, but wrong in the sense of misdiagnosed. What if your restlessness is not boredom, but hunger? What if your cynicism is not wisdom, but exhaustion? What if your distance from the faith is not maturity, but grief you never finished grieving?

Lewis once noted that Christianity does not promise comfort first, but honesty first. Christmas follows the same order. It tells the truth before it offers joy. It names the darkness before lighting the candle. It waits.

And then, quietly, it says this.

The cure is not an idea. The cure is not a principle. The cure is a person. A person who does not recoil from your doubt, your resentment, your past church wounds, or your practiced indifference. A person who enters history precisely because history cannot fix itself.

Christmas does not exist to make you feel nostalgic. It exists because without intervention, the story ends badly. Christmas is the season that remembers this without apology.

If you are post-Christian, Christmas is not here to drag you back. It is here to ask whether you ever truly left the question behind. Whether the ache you keep managing might actually be an invitation. Whether the cure you dismissed is still standing at the door.

The lights will come on soon enough. The songs will swell. The Child will arrive, unarmed, unguarded, unimpressive by every modern metric.

And Christmas will have done its work if, even for a moment, you wonder whether the faith you thought you outgrew might still know something about you that you have not yet dared to face.

The night is long.

The world is unwell.

And the cure does not wait for our approval.

by Donavon Riley, pastor, author, and writer at 1517