by Christie Purifoy | Dec 2, 2011 | Advent, Chicago, Family, Florida, Jesus, Seasons
I live in the “Sunshine State.” This is no mere tourist slogan, I assure you. This is the truth. And, after ten years in Chicago, I was utterly unprepared for it.
Do you know what it is to long for darkness?
Recently, our skies were heavy and dark for four days. This is unheard of here. Oh, we get plenty of rain: towering, fierce clouds and thunder to rattle your bones, but it rarely lasts long. But this was a nor’easter. For four days it rained, and the leaden clouds never dispersed. Until … they did. The sun came back, the blue sky that is our constant Florida refrain finally returned, and I could have wept. I wanted those clouds back.
Foolish? Perhaps. But here is what I love about darkness: it is the fitting backdrop to hot tea, hot coffee, and hot cocoa (I do like my drinks hot). It is “cozy” weather, as my kids say. Poor things. Here, in Florida, when a summer thunderstorm begins they out-shout the thunder: “Let’s get cozy!” We burrow beneath pillows and blankets on the sofa, but we’re lucky if the sun isn’t shining again by the time we open our storybook.
They’ve inherited my darkness-loving gene, I suppose. Or maybe it comes by birth. I may have been raised in Texas, but I was born in Rapid City, South Dakota, and my children were born into Chicago’s urban darkness, where winter means clouds and tall buildings cast deep shadows on even the brightest days.
In addition to hot drinks and storybooks read by the light of a flashlight, we love dinner by candlelight, Christmas books by the twinkling light of the tree, moonlight on snow (oh, how I miss this, though moonlight on ocean waves is lovely, too). In other words, we love the little lights, like fireflies on a summer evening. Like boats at night on Lake Michigan or the St. Johns River. Like warm lamplight on the pages of a book.
We love the light that shows up best against a backdrop of darkness.
When the light of the world came to us, our world was very dark. And His light was small. Cradle-sized. Today, his face may look “like the sun shining in all its brilliance,” but when he was born to us, it was with a delicate, fragile light (Revelation 1:16).
His birth was like the moon.
His return will be like the sun.
To keep up with each post this Advent season, visit the facebook page for There is a River and click “Like.” You can also receive each post delivered straight to your inbox by clicking here to subscribe by email.
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 1, 2011 | Advent, Community, Home
Perhaps the most difficult thing about darkness is that it tells us we are alone.
Darkness, it lies.
Long ago, the church began celebrating its new year during winter’s darkest days. This seems right and good, to me. It’s in times of darkness that we most need to be reminded that we do not wait alone.
Whether or not we’re able to attend church regularly, whether or not we’ve found a place to call our church “home,” and whether or not we truly feel at home there, we do not wait alone.
I believe that this is true, even on the days when it doesn’t feel true. Even on the days when I find community in the pages of a book written decades ago rather than in flesh-and-blood conversation.
In fact, waiting with others is the point of Christian community. One of my favorite writers, Henri Nouwen puts it well:
“The whole meaning of the Christian community lies in offering a space in which we wait for that which we have already seen. Christian community is the place where we keep the flame alive among us and take it seriously, so that it can grow and become stronger in us. In this way we can live with courage, trusting that there is a spiritual power in us that allows us to live in this world without being seduced constantly by despair, lostness, and darkness. That is how we dare to say that God is a God of love even when we see hatred all around us. … We say it together. We affirm it in one another. Waiting together, nurturing what has already begun, expecting its fulfillment – that is the meaning of marriage, friendship, community, and the Christian life.” (from “A Spirituality of Waiting,” as written in my Book of Quotations)
Sometimes I feel lost in the darkness, whether it is a global darkness (famine, crimes against children, poverty) or the darkness that descends when I forget that life is not meant to be as complicated as I sometimes make it (with my buying, my rushing, my worrying).
Advent reminds me to slow down, to light my candle, to find comfort in the many candles lit around me, and to know, again, that if the only thing I do most days is wait patiently, with thanksgiving, then I have lived well.
“The Photographer,” otherwise known as Kelli Campbell, invites each of you to contribute your own Advent images to the Advent Flickr group. If you are not a photographer, we hope you will still join both of us there to watch as the season quietly unfolds in pictures.
by Christie Purifoy | Nov 30, 2011 | Advent, Faith, God's promises, Jesus, Scripture, Waiting
The Bible is an often cacophonous, centuries-long conversation with God about the things of God, but some of its most powerful voices have spoken to us out of darkness.
There is Job, who understood that God himself had “blocked” his way and “shrouded” his paths “in darkness” (Job 19:8).
There is Jeremiah, lifelong witness to unimaginable chaos, suffering, and loss.
Both stared into the darkness of their lives, darkness willed by the God they faithfully served, and saw … something good. But also something so mysterious they could not name it.
God spoke to Job from the darkness of a storm, and Job received wisdom, like a spark of light. “I know that you can do all things; no plan of yours can be thwarted,” Job responded. “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 42: 2,3).
With the sound of weeping in his ears, Jeremiah received a glorious yet inexplicable vision: “The Lord will create a new thing on earth – a woman will surround a man” (Jeremiah 31: 22).
In darkness, they were given Light.
And we who live on the other side of the mystery, we who are citizens of a kingdom Job and Jeremiah could only dream of, who are we to despair? Who are we to lose hope?
We, too, are promise-bearers. For, we know: He will come again.
“And we have the word of the prophets made more certain, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.”
2 Peter 1:19
To keep up with each post this Advent season, visit the facebook page for There is a River and click “Like.” You can also receive each post delivered straight to your inbox by clicking here to subscribe by email.
by Christie Purifoy | Nov 29, 2011 | Advent, Family, Seasons
What is the point of darkness? Have you ever wondered?
In the beginning, we read, God created light, and he separated the light from darkness. Why didn’t he banish darkness?
We might argue that darkness is not inherently good or bad. It simply is. But something deep within us fears otherwise. One of the plagues sent to torment the Egyptians was a plague of darkness, after all.
If light is good and life-giving (in the natural world and in metaphor), I like to remember that it is most beautiful when it appears in darkness.
Each December at their Chicago preschool, my children walked an advent spiral. The usually bustling preschool classroom was silent and dark. The only light came from the candle burning at the center of a child-sized evergreen spiral on the classroom floor. In turn, from smallest to biggest, each child carried an apple, hollowed out to hold a candle, from the spiral’s entrance to its heart. Carefully lighting their candle (with the help of a preschool teacher dressed as an angel), each child walked slowly out again, depositing their candle along the spiral until the room filled with candlelight.
It always felt, to me, like one of the most spiritually profound moments of our year. Perhaps only excepting the year my then-two-year-old daughter caught her hair on fire. Well … maybe that year too. The angel did her job, and, ultimately, no little girls were harmed in the making of this magical, advent moment.
But, oh, those lights … we needed the darkness in order to see their beauty. In order to appreciate their message of hope.
For a while, we may sit in total darkness. Darkness, however, is never the end of the story. Ours or the world’s.
The darkness will not last forever. Morning will come. Your Light will come.
by Christie Purifoy | Nov 28, 2011 | Advent, Poetry, Seasons, Waiting
In keeping with my “poem-each-Monday” tradition, here is a poem for you on this first Monday of Advent.
These lines come from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. They remind me of this Advent paradox: in a wintery season of death and darkness we perceive birth and new life. Midwinter spring, indeed.
from “Little Gidding”
Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but Pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?
– T. S. Eliot
by Christie Purifoy | Nov 27, 2011 | Advent, Jesus, prayer
A Prayer for the First Sunday of Advent
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
– from The Book of Common Prayer
“The Photographer,” otherwise known as Kelli Campbell, invites each of you to contribute your own Advent images to the Advent Flickr group. If you are not a photographer, we hope you will still join both of us there to watch as the season quietly unfolds in pictures.
