Author: Mary Elyn Bahlert

My Christmas tree is the holiday to me.

I love to reflect on the deeper meanings of the season, and I love to remember our  connection to the people of all ages who have waited and longed and honored the coming of the light after the season of darkness.

I imagine us, dust and snow rising, our boots digging up the roots and leaves of autumn, dancing around the tree that stands in the middle of a clearing in a dark, dark, dark forest … as we dance the passing of time, as we dance the changing of the year, of this moment, of this hour, of this day.  The tree is our altar.  The star that shines above the tree is in the sky, and the sky, too, is dancing, honoring in its own way the passing of time.  As we dance, we feel in ourselves that elemental humanness, that elemental place that connects us to each other, to the tree, to the dust, to the snow, to the sky, to the star.  We are one with all.  We are one.   We feel that elemental place in our guts, in our legs, in the soles of our feet, in our whole selves.  Yes!  We feel the elemental life force of those who circle with us, those who honor darkness, and wait for light.  This is us.  This is all of humanity.

This autumn, I have written often about the descent into the darkness, that place in each of us where the light lies.  This descent into the darkness is for all of us, we are all gifted with the darkness as part of being human.  Yes!  we say into the deepness of the dark.  Yes! we say as we emerge, once again, from that dark place into another place.   We emerge, different, each time we go deep.  We grow older.  We grow wiser.  We are connected to everyone we encounter; we see ourselves in the “other.”  We carry with us, after that deeper journey, something more solid, more whole.  We know we are one with one another, with All That Is.

All of these things connect us to the suffering of the world, for in our connection is our knowing that we are all alike.  We all suffer.  We all know darkness, and we all know that life is hard.  Yes, we say, as we extend our hand to the other, as we extend our hearts into the world.  Yes!

This year, even the moon joins us in the dance.  Mother Moon will be full on the day of Christmas, the Christian way of honoring the Light.  Mother Moon will take our hand, she will sing, she will kick up the dirt and the waves in the ocean, and she will rejoice – yes! – with the coming of the Light.

However you honor the passage of time, whatever your tradition, this is your journey to yes!  Yes, yes, yes…

roses, sunset, 12/15

Days shorten, march toward the darkest time,

shine, shine, shine, day into night.

Shorter days give way – in due time –

to the light, the coming of light.

I will awaken a little bit on that day.  You will, too.

We take our place in the marching of the years, the millennia,

yes, you and I, marking our place in time with the creatures of the forests,

the dancing holy ones –

those folks marching to plant again in spring.

Something in us, something in them, is jarred to life again when the light returns,

lengthens the days,

makes us murmur at the quickly passing life we have lived, we are living.

This autumn, I can see (from my previous posts!) that I have been reflecting on the darkness that is part of us all, and part of the journey of our lives.  Without the darkness  we do not witness the Light.

Now, we are entering the season of darkness.  In the liturgy of the Church, this is the season of Advent – which means, “coming.”  The symbolic meaning is that this time is the time before the Light returns – the Light of days turning longer, of the seasons passing from light to twilight, from twilight and once again, to darkness, and then –  leaning toward light.

From times that pre-dated the Christian era in world history, people of all cultures have honored the Coming of the Light – solstice celebrations, dances in nature on the darkest night, giving way to the first moments of the longer days, the Arriving.  Christians took on the traditions of the past and made them their own, while still honoring the passages of time, of life, and of death.

In the past few years, I have had the privilege of having my eyes open to the changing of the light, from moment to moment, from day to day, from season to season, and now, from year to year.  This past Sunday morning, I called my husband into our room from his morning preparations.  For a moment, the Asian maple outside our bedroom windows was blazing – yes, blazing! – with light.  And in another moment, this blazing light was gone.

Still, we were privileged to have witnessed that blazing red maple.

The years seem to pass this way, also – quickly, darting from one to the next.  Where did those long, long days of summer as a child go?  Where did the winters, never-ending, in the Midwest, with the wicked winds off Lake Michigan, and the darkness that did not ever seem to give way to light?  Where did those long days, confined to bed as a child with the measles, go?  How long ago those dark, cold Christmas Eves when the church was filled with the light of candles, and each child received a box of chocolate-covered cherries for her efforts at memorizing the story of Christmas?  Where are those anxious years of young adulthood, wondering whether I could really make a life for myself?  Where are all those worries, those uncertainties, those conflicts that seemed to be the last?  Where have they all gone?

Like dust, they have flown away, away from me.

Now, I am here, honoring the light and the darkness, watching the days move and change, from moment to moment.  Here I am, grateful for this blessed time, when I fall in love with life more deeply, every day.  I see the seasons change each day in the branches and leaves of my beloved birch tree, outside my front window.  I see the birds change, too, as the seasons change, now in autumn, flitting quickly from branch to branch, and then on to another tree, in search of food for another day.  I see the machine-like movements of the local squirrels, squirreling away food for the winter.  I see how strong – and how vulnerable – each creature is to the changing of the seasons.

We face into time, more conscious of it as we grow older.  We face into time, savoring what we can from what we have saved, learning to trust, more and more, as a child learns to trust, one step, then another, on her wobbly, chubby legs, and then – to walk.

Now, we face into the time of Darkness, before the Coming of the Light.  That Darkness is in you, and it is in me.  And surely, surely, so is Light.

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.”

“Maybe it is the dark and shadowy voices themselves that lead us to freedom.” – Mary Elyn Bahlert, November, 2015

I wrote those words in my last post.   A new thought: that the places of darkness in ourselves lead us to freedom.  It is the things we dislike, the problems, the pain, the depression, the unremembered memories, the things that have hurt us, that lead us into the light.

And isn’t that the way it is?  If we are in a dark hallway, we search with our hands for the light switch.  The darkness leads us to reach for the light.

If the darkness leads us into the light, then we give thanks, even for the darkness, for that is the One Who Saves, who leads us to freedom.  Without the pain in my own life, I would not have searched for the light.  Without the pain – had I only been in the dusk – I would not have searched frantically, and with earnestness, and with all of my resources, for the light.

But I did.

This is a post of hope.  The hope is this – and hope, hope is always complete, whole, not something fragile, but something strong – the hope is that we can be grateful, always, and with our whole selves, for those darker, shadowy, nagging parts of ourselves.  We can be grateful for the painful parts of ourselves.

I have seen it over and over again, this reaching for the light that comes from those who are in pain.  When I think of people who don’t seem to need the light, I think they  have not been awakened in the night by their pain, by their roiling minds, by their physical pain.  In a way, they are the ones who have not been given the gift of light.

In my own life, I have the great pleasure of having walked with People of the Light.  These are the people to whom I turn when I want to lay out myself as I am; to these people I give the gift of my doubts, my sorrows, my sadness, my longings that have not been fulfilled.  These are the people who listen, silently, and who nod, silently, as they listen.  These are the ones who can be trusted with my journey, my convoluted, circuitous, unclear journey.  These are the ones who do not offer me solutions.  Instead, they only give me the beauty of their presence.  They hold a place for my own darkness because they have witnessed that darkness in themselves.  And that is enough.

In its own way, the darkness is enough.

In the world, I see this darkness, of course.  And I see how we frantically try to get rid of the darkness, we put it out of sight, we kill it.  Then, it rises up again.  It rises up in all of us, for when we answer darkness with darkness, we only go further into the darkness, ourselves.  We have not turned to the light.  We have not wrestled the gift from the darkness.

***

Today, my heart is with the people of France, of Paris.  In this time of mourning, mourning for lost lives and for lost innocence, may they be comforted.  My prayer is that their leaders will lead them toward light, turn away from the darkness.