This is Advent: that Christ came, that Christ again shall come to redeem what is broken, that we, in hope, must wait.
This, then, is hope: that waiting is hard down here in the dark, and yet…
And yet.
We’ve lived a couple of stints in far north places during wintertime. In Spokane, Washington, which sits just below the 49th parallel and on the far eastern end of the time zone, darkness fell in December around 3:30 in the afternoon. There was a fair trade, sure, when the July sun rose before 5:00 and the sky held light until after 10:00, but my starkest memories of winter—more than cold, more than snow, both abundant—are of darkness. It was a rhythm we all acknowledged—what else could one do?—even in the liturgical calendar of our Presbyterian church. There, at the hibernal solstice, we observed a service based on darkness, on that line we attribute to St. John of the Cross about the “dark night of the soul.”
It’s hard to hope in darkness. In part it’s because, well, we can’t see. But I think it’s hard also because we maintain a thin concept of hope. There’s a line I once read from Wendell Berry, and it stuck with me: “It’s a bad move to get into a contest between optimism and pessimism. The steadying requirement is for hope.”[1]
Hope, we know, is not despair. But it’s not optimism either. Despair is to believe we’re stuck in the dark, that the night is here to stay. Optimism is to stand at 3:30 on a December afternoon in eastern Washington and sing Yes, but the sun’ll come out tomorrow! True enough, perhaps. But tomorrow isn’t soon, and sometimes, as today’s David Wilcox lyric suggests, we find ourselves walking the road alone, a thin coat against the chill.
Hope, then, is steadying. It’s neither despair nor denial, but a belief that beauty and graces—stars on the darkest night, a seed buried deep beneath the snow, a babe lying helpless in the straw—can still find us when we stand a while in darkness.
So this is Advent: that Christ came, that Christ again shall come to redeem what is broken, that we, in hope, must wait.
Reflection
What does it mean to experience darkness truthfully and yet hope?
Prayer
Deep in us, o Lord, is a yearning unfulfilled: for forgiveness, salvation, restoration, new beginning. Teach us to be people who hope, who encounter the darkness without glossing past it, who know the end of the story but have work to do until it is finished, who point to you, the source of truth and beauty and all good gifts now and evermore. Amen.
[1] Wendell Berry, quoted in Kathryn Shattuck, “Out on the Prairie, Moon, Music, and Lectures, Too” New York Times, October 2, 2012, available from: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/03/us/prairie-festival-draws-crowds-to-land-institute-in-kansas.html. Berry isn’t the first to describe hope this way, to be sure. St. Augustine called presumption and despair “two siren voices, each opposed to the other, but both dangerous,” and insisted, instead, that hope is the virtue worth our striving.
Andy is married to Tiffany and is dad to Anna (13) and Caroline (9). He likes books, running, travel, and the Clemson Tigers.
