On a winter's solstice

On this, the longest night of the year, I sit and feel the darkness of December. Even our best weapons—strands of lights creeping through the Christmas tree, a dozen candles glowing in windows, an illuminated Nativity set—seem a feeble defense against the depth of the darkness outside and in. Outside, the only lights I see are pinpricks in the valley below. And inside, I keep remembering the bare, honest words a friend wrote after the children’s choir sang in church. “I don’t feel the joy of what the children sang this morning,” she said. Oh, yes. If our Christmas lights are our defense against the dark outside, then our Christmas carols and hymns are our battle waged against the weariness, the stress, the ache of December.

If I am honest, it’s the inside darkness that I feel most of all. For a winter’s solstice is but a passing darkness; the earth will keep turning on her axis, pushing us again toward light and warmth. But the ugliness inside me stays, sloshing around like the dregs of a drink I never wanted to imbibe. And I have been ugly today: too quick to speak, too slow to listen, too impatient with mistakes, too preoccupied to praise. I look at the baby Jesus lying in the manger and think, “Here? You chose to come here?” Tonight I want to run as far away from myself as I can. And yet here gather the shepherds and the wise men, Mary and Joseph, drawing close to the God who came as Emmanuel: the God who drew near to us.

About five years ago, I bought a chalkboard at a consignment sale and propped it up beside our front door. Although I intended it for the kids, it gradually morphed into our welcome sign, where I would write the names of the friends or guests who would be visiting on any given day. By now, the chalkboard is a fixture, and my welcome messages are both habitual and deeply intentional. The physical act of writing on my chalkboard has become a balm to my spirit, like a deep breath, like a moment of centering. I bend down to wipe the chalkboard clean and stay bent as I form the words of welcome. More than any other preparation I make, that act is my truest gesture of hospitality. Yes, I also clean floors and cook food, but somehow those acts can be done for me as much for anyone else. My chalkboard has become my place of prayer, my place to say, “God, this is a gift for you.”

When he came, newborn, into our world, Jesus had no welcome sign save for a star. Only the urgency of labor created a place for him to rest; only the shepherds, after a divine wake-up call, showed up that night to welcome him. But I wonder, now, if I’ve thought about this all wrong. Perhaps God wasn’t looking for a welcome sign from us; perhaps Jesus himself was a welcome sign to us. The God of the universe bent down and came to us as a baby and said to humanity, “You are welcome here.” He blessed the human body by taking on flesh and blessed the human spirit by taking on emotions. He blessed our weakness by becoming weak, and he enfolded our darkness into his glorious light.

Our family has been reading through one of Ann Voskamp’s Advent devotional books this month, Unwrapping the Greatest Gift:  A Family Celebration of Christmas. I was gone the night we started it, so my good husband read aloud to the kids. The picture for that first day is a tree stump with a green, leafy branch growing out of it. And the scripture passage comes from Isaiah 11, where the prophet proclaims:  "Out of the stump of David’s family will grow a shoot—yes, a new Branch bearing fruit from the old root. And the Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord… In that day the heir to David’s throne will be a banner of salvation to all the world. The nations will rally to him, and the land where he lives will be a glorious place.”

The next morning I opened the Advent book to the picture of the tree stump and asked my small son what it meant. “That’s a family that failed God,” he said. And when I pointed to the green branch, he answered without missing a beat, “That’s love.” I was amazed by his retention of the story and moved even more by the gospel truth in his simple retelling. Who are we, on this darkest day of the year, but a family that failed God? Like Jesse and all his tribe, we have rejected God’s words and his heart; we have turned away time and again from the light, from what we know to be true and good and right. And who are we, on this darkest day of the year, but a family chosen by God, redeemed by God, and beloved of God?

Isaiah says that “the land where he lives will be a glorious place”—glorious not because of us, but because of Jesus, because he chose to come and to abide and to be our Emmanuel. Even on the darkest day of the year, Jesus is the God who is with us, the light in our darkness, and the love growing right out of the middle of our mess.