Rest a while

In South Africa, in the face of racial injustice, and segregation known as apartheid people of faith began to pray together and, as a sign of their hope that one day the evil of apartheid would be overcome, they lit candles and placed them in their windows so that their neighbours, the government, and the whole world would see their belief. And their government did see. They passed a law making it illegal, a politically subversive act, to light a candle and put it in your window. It was seen as a crime, as serious as owning and flaunting a gun. The irony of this wasn’t missed by the children. At the height of the struggle against apartheid, the children of Soweto had a joke: “Our government,” they said, “is afraid of lit candles!”

It had reason to be. Eventually those burning candles, and the prayer and hope behind them, changed the wind in South Africa. Morally shamed by its own people, the government conceded that apartheid was wrong and dismantled it without a war, defeated by hope, brought down by lit candles backed by prayer. Hope had changed the wind.

During the season of Advent, Christians are asked to light candles as a sign of hope. Unfortunately, this practice, ritualized in the lighting of the candles in the advent wreath, has in recent years been seen too much simply as piety (not that piety doesn’t have its own virtues, especially the virtue of nurturing hope inside our children). But lighting a candle in hope is not just a pious, religious act; it’s a political act, a subversive one, and a prophetic one, as dangerous as brandishing a firearm.

To light an advent candle is to say, in the face of all that suggests the contrary, that God is still alive, still Lord of this world, and, because of that, “all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of being will be well,” irrespective of the evening news.

Quiz time – what are the names given to each of the four Advent candles?

The Christian season of Advent is very frequently characterised in the word “waiting”.

We do well as we begin this new liturgical season to remind ourselves of that Latin root of the familiar word ‘Advent’ – veni.

Veni speaks of ‘coming’ – the coming of Christ.

(we remind ourselves of the famous quote of Julius Ceasar “veni, vidi, vici” – I came. I saw. I conquered.)

Our early Gospel readings for this season suggest Christ’s second coming in glorious majesty, and then his initial ‘coming’ from the womb of Mary and the humbleness of Bethlehem.

These two great comings frame those regular, in- between, and at times unexpected, moments of Christ’s coming.

“This is my Body, this is My Blood” – how many times do I say and/or hear those words throughout the year. Said very specifically in the celebration of the Christian Eucharist; said less specifically and yet with equal realness during moments of encounter with another person or perhaps piece of music (Mozart’s Requiem for example, or Beethoven or Bach).

We also find the word ‘advent’ at the beginning of the word ‘adventure’.
The knights in Thomas Malory’s ‘Le Morte d’Arthur’ say to one another, “Let us take the adventure that God sends us”.

The metaphor of adventure is strong also in the works of C. S Lewis.

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Reepicheep is always harping on about honour and adventure. The little mouse’s courage pushes everyone on the crew to greater heights of courage because they refuse to be outdone by a mouse.

The others sometimes become annoyed with Reepicheep because everything is an adventure to him.

Any time they want to turn back or be cautious, Reepicheep pulls the adventure card, and they can’t turn back.

“This is a very great adventure, and no danger seems to me so great as that of knowing when I get back to Narnia that I left a mystery behind me through fear.” Reepicheep in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Again in the ‘Chronicles of Narnia ‘series in the last of the seven books, “The Last Battle,”. More than once, the major characters, facing an uncertain future or even death itself, place themselves under the “care of the Lion” and in courage and obedience to him say, “Let us now take the adventure that Aslan sends us…”

This Advent let’s make the season a time of adventure, and ‘Let us now take the adventure that God sends us.’

The illustration is from Chapter 7 of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The chapter is titled “A Day with the Beavers.” The children, Peter, Susan, Lucy and Edmund are taken to a meal with Mr and Mrs Beaver.

The 16thC Spanish mystic St John of the Cross has a particular image in his book titled The Dark Night of the Soul:

Intimacy with God and with each other will only take place, he says, when we reach a certain kindling temperature.

For too much of our lives, he suggests, we lie around as damp, green logs inside the fire of love, waiting to come to flame but never bursting into flame because of our dampness.

At first, the fire acts on the wood by driving out all its moisture. Very slowly, it expels from the wood everything that is inconsistent with fire’s nature. It then starts to burn on the outside until, at last, it transforms the wood into fire.

This process of drying is something that, at first, we resist.

However, we begin to recognize its benefits in producing in us a greater conformity to God. John writes, “the whole of our spiritual life can be seen as a preparation for the soul to receive more deeply the love of God.

And, in the same way that a dry log catches fire more easily than a wet one, so the soul responds more immediately to the impulse of God the more prepared it is by the Holy Spirit.”

St. John suggests that we undergo this transformation through the pain of loneliness, restlessness, disquiet, anxiety, frustration, and unrequited desire. In the torment of incompleteness, our psychic temperature rises so that eventually, we come to a kindling temperature, and there, we finally open ourselves to union in new ways.

It is, I suggest, an image for our Advent time.

Advent is about a “holy longing”, about getting in touch with this longing, about heightening it, about letting it raise our psychic temperatures, about sizzling as damp, green logs inside the fires of intimacy, about intuiting the kingdom of God by seeing, through desire, what the world might look like if a Messiah were to come and, with us, establish justice, peace, and unity on this earth.