by Christie Purifoy | Dec 6, 2011 | Advent, Jesus, Scripture, Waiting
Living in a one-hundred-year-old apartment in the city, we took our baths in a narrow, enameled tub. Back then, I found the idea of a jetted, whirlpool bathtub very appealing. I live in suburbia now, and I have just such a tub. Alas, the reality is less exciting than the fantasy.
I think I tried using the jets once. As it turns out, I don’t much like soaking in bubbles with the sound of a motor in my ears. Now the jets only get turned on when the big kids want to terrify the two-year-old during bathtime.
Even worse, without an apartment-building-sized boiler, we don’t actually have enough hot water to fill this fancy whirlpool bath to the top. I’ve learned the hard way to open only the hot water tap and not to let it run past halfway, lest I find myself with a tub full of lukewarm water.
Still, I do occasionally indulge (minus the jets and with the tub less than full). Recently, my soak was disturbed by the shrieks of my arguing children. I sank down beneath the water hoping to block out the noise and was surprised by the enveloping silence.
Immediately, I was a kid again. At what other stage of life do you spend so much time going pruney beneath the bathwater or shutting out the sounds of Marco-Polo cries at the swimming pool?
I’d forgotten how loud this kind of watery silence actually is. There is a whole other world in this silence: the rush of blood, the wheeze of each breath. It is a noisy world within a world, though it is generally unnoticed, unheard.
I typically imagine silence to be a kind of emptiness. A kind of nothingness.
The gap between Old and New Testaments suggests that God was silent for many, many years before the birth of his son.
I wonder what this silence signified. Emptiness? Distance? Or, could it have been, a world within a world?
When the infant Jesus was presented at the Temple, there were two waiting for him. Two, prepared to recognize and honor him: Simeon and Anna.
In these two we glimpse the truth. God’s silence weighed so heavy on them that they knew he was neither distant nor inactive. They knew their Christ was coming.
One day, he arrives. The silence erupts. The angels sing.
On this day, many can see what had always been there unnoticed and unheard. Songs of joy and prayers of thanksgiving are lifted to the heavens over one tiny head.
But Simeon and Anna are not surprised. They have long been listening to the sound of blood pumping and breath rising. They know that God’s silence is anything but empty.
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 3, 2011 | Advent
O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
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.
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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
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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.
