Values for Advent 4: Illumination

‘What if this present were the world’s last night?’  The seventeenth century metaphysical poet John Donne puts that question in one of his Divine Poems.  He was much exercised by thoughts about the end of the world and about death, the end of his world.  ‘This is my play’s last scene, here heavens appoint / My pilgrimage’s last mile’;  ‘Oh my black soul!  Now thou art summoned / By sickness, death’s herald, and champion’; ‘Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste, / I run to death, and death meets me as fast, / And all my pleasures are like yesterday’.  And with death come thoughts of darkness, for his was a troubled soul.  ‘To see God only, I go out of sight: / And to ’scape stormy days I choose An everlasting night’.  

For Donne, the Winter Solstice held powerful significance: the shortest day, the ‘year’s midnight’ as he calls it.  This precarious axis of the seasons when the sun’s light almost fails is for him a metaphor of his spiritual condition: wondering, hoping but not always expecting that the light will grow strong again, half believing that it might not.  Midwinter raises anxiety about the last things: solstitium: the sun stands still in the sky, the light burns low, and life is short, and nature holds out no promise that she will ever renew herself or that this pale sun whose rays barely penetrate to earth could ever warm another living thing.  

For most of us, the Solstice (at 4.19 am on the morning of Sunday 22 December) will pass unnoticed.  We are insulated from it not just by electric light and central heating and the ceaseless flow of online activity, but by the business that occupies us in the days before Christmas.  But those whose lives are tuned to the rhythms of the seasons and the rise and fall of light pay attention: Pennine farmers, market gardeners, seafarers, meteorologists, astronomers, poets.  For billions in our world, less burdened by technology than we are, these primal rhythms are close to what it means to sustain life, hold out the prospect of a tomorrow as well as a today.  ‘What if this present were the world’s last night?’ is not the private fantasy of a morbid soul.  It is the question to ask when the planet is spinning relentlessly towards an irreversible climate catastrophe.  The first victims to suffer will be the poor and voiceless of the developing world.  The world’s last night is no longer the fantasy of a fevered imagination.  The apocalypse is now.

In these days before Christmas, you may wish I’d lighten up (an apt image for the solstice if you think about it).  But while modern Anglican texts soften as Christmas approaches, the Book of Common Prayer maintains a tougher Advent focus.  Sunday’s collect is one of the most majestic in the book: ‘O Lord, raise up thy power and come among us, and with great might succour us’: we call on God as those who are helpless because he alone can rescue us.  In the Prayer Book communion rite, both the third and fourth Sundays of Advent give us gospel readings about John the Baptist, hardly comfortable reading for Advent.  The Great O antiphons of Advent are a crying for the light at this dark time of the year: ‘O Morning Star, splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness: come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death’.  And when Advent at last utters the name ‘God with us’ in the antiphon of the final day before Christmas Eve, it is longing and desire that run through it: ‘O Emmanuel, our King and our Lawgiver, the hope of the nations and their Saviour: come and save us O Lord our God’.  Come…. Come….It is futures that we fasten on in Advent: futures promised, futures glimpsed, and yes, futures feared as well.  

At the Solstice, people used to kindle fires to keep light and warmth alive and cherish them for the long year ahead.  Perhaps it is the distant origin of fairy lights and Christmas trees; perhaps we still need to echo our forebears and in ceremony and symbol act out the issues of light and dark. In many cathedrals and churches, the traditional Advent procession moves up the church from west to east: a movement towards the light, at first experienced partially, brokenly, as if it might be swallowed up again by the immense darkness in which we stand and wonder and wait.  Gradually that fragile light is established; it grows until it reaches its full strength, luminous, radiant like the heavenly Jerusalem, the city that ‘has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.’ ‘Eternity’s sunrise’ to quote Blake’s famous phrase.

Yet the hope remains future.  We don’t yet possess it.  We still pray ‘Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus!’, for the kingdom is not yet present and God’s purposed not yet fulfilled.  We ask every day in Advent that we may ‘cast away the works of darkness’ and that God may put upon us ‘the armour of light now in the time of this mortal life’.  We glimpsed the light of God’s presence in that great climax of the Advent Procession, but then it was taken from us again: for it was but a glimpse of glory given for a while.  It had to subside, for at the end we have to go outside again into the night, like the winter sparrow in Bede’s parable who flies into the warm lit hall only to fly out again into the cold and dark. 

It’s in that half-light of daily existence that the prayer, ‘Come thou long-expected Jesus’ becomes most real. It breathes desire, expectancy, hope.  We know we can face the night, for this vision will sustain us, Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun who is the glory of the nations.  We know that though we walk in darkness we have seen a great light and need not be afraid.  In midwinter the darkness envelops us again, fraught with ambiguity. The bright clear long light of summer is but a memory.  For now. But darkness is not necessarily ominous and bad.  In the Bible clouds and darkness are where you find the presence of God. ‘There is in God a deep and dazzling darkness’ says the poet, drawing on a long Christian mystical tradition.  ‘Churches are best for prayer, that have least light’ says Donne.

It was on Christmas Day in Durham Cathedral ten years ago that the ‘new creation’ high altar frontal was unveiled.  It shows the rising sun, its golden rays penetrating to and animating the extremities of creation.  It rises out of a blue sea, as if to remind us of Advent and waiting for the God’s purposes to be fulfilled.  For even the birth of Jesus is not the end but the beginning of our world’s redemption, the dawning of the light.  The sun has yet to rise completely and fill the sky.  Across the frontal is a thin red arc, almost invisible until you come close to it, the thread of pain and passion stitched across glory which is the cost of it, the destiny of the Holy Child.  On Solstice day, which this year falls on the first day of the week that we call Sun-Day, we celebrate the light that is coming among us while at the same time we hold in our hearts those who in the dark places of pain and passion wait each day for deliverance.

‘What if this present were the world’s last night?’  Only when we ask John Donne’s question for our world and for ourselves can we begin to hope.  It is a clarifying question, for it tells us that there is work to do and darkness to dispel and lives to change.   There are four days of Advent left to us.  We must make the most of them, especially as after Sunday the days will start getting longer again, and the light become stronger; for ‘the night is far spent and the day is at hand’, the day of Christ whose glory fills the skies. 

Christmas: taking the long view

Four days ago it was midwinter, solstice day. Here in this Cathedral, the brightest days are not in high summer but in deepest winter when the sun shines almost horizontally into the building and illuminates the vaults from below. For the few days on either side of the shortest day, you are not aware of any change in the sun’s altitude. But as the calendar comes full circle, the light begins to lengthen: ever so slowly at first, but perceptibly. It takes time for it to make a real difference. But we know it is happening. The light and warmth will return. The cycle begins once more.

Since ancient times, Christmas Day has been linked to the natural rhythms of earth and sky and nature. Like the Roman Saturnalia that celebrated the birth of sol invictus, the unconquered sun a few days after the solstice, Christians rejoiced in the birth of the Sun of Righteousness who had risen with healing in his wings. As they did this at the darkest time of the year, they experienced a surge of hope because of the one who would come, this promised dawn that prophets and seers had looked forward to, this long awaited Messiah and Saviour of the World. They longed for a sunrise of wonder. And now, the great Sun is shedding his great light on people who walked in darkness. The world begins to be bathed in it, coaxed into life, turning back towards the source of grace and truth.

The midwinter festivities that our Christmas customs owe so much to were never an end in themselves. Their point was to keep the precious light alive during a season of darkness and death. The rituals looked forward to the return of life in the springtime, the greening of the earth once more, the gift of fertile fields and orchards, the warmth of summer and the fruits of the harvest. In other words, the middle of winter opened up a long view, took a perspective on another new year.

And so must Christmas be about more than just today, wonderful though it is. Throughout Advent we have reached out for that dawn that will herald the end of all that is wrong in the world. We have learned how to take the long view, see how our lives are part of something greater. That something is what God wants to do with this universe, how he wants to end its sorrows and its pain. He has set eternity in our hearts and puts that same longing within all of us. So as Advent yields to Christmas, it is not that we come to the end of a journey. Far from it: we are launched on a voyage of faith and hope, full of confidence in the God whom we see in the baby of Bethlehem. That tiny, cherished life is like the precarious light of the sun at midwinter. How easily it could be snuffed out, as Herod tried to do in his massacre of the innocent children. But we know that light and love will not be extinguished. Because of Christmas, they are here to stay: His name is ‘God with us’, Jesus our Immanuel, says our reading.

This year we recall the Christmas Truce 100 years ago today that was kept by enemy soldiers along the Western Front. That outbreak of peace was extraordinary and unexpected, when men shared food and drink, showed one another photos of their loved ones, kicked balls around and sang carols together. It must have felt like a gift from heaven amid the mud, the slaughter, the smell of fear: perhaps a bit like a tiny solstice when the guns were silenced, and the sun was permitted to rise again into the clear air and shine into dark and murky places, and hardened men gazed into the sky and heard the birds sing and dreamed about a better world.

That was all for a while, an all too brief interval in a terrible war. It was only a truce. But Christmas can feel like that, in a world where there seems to be terror on every side with so little prospect of an end to suffering and pain; or when life feels unbearably hard or our personal demons haunt us. We can treat Christmas like a short-lived truce, when we are permitted not to peer over the horizon for fear of what we might see that could take away our merriment. But Christmas is not a truce, not if we take the long view. If we truly take in what we are celebrating today, God here among us in the infant Jesus, it changes our entire perspective on life. It is God’s sunrise on an old and weary earth, his promise to banish the shadows of our existence. If we can only see it, the Sun is rising upon us. In Jesus’ birth, the whole of time enters a new era. Our little lives take on an eternal significance because we know now that God cares for each of us. The solstice of dark and despair has passed. The Light of the World has come, the light that shines in the darkness. The darkness can never overcome the Great Light that enlightens every human being who has ever been and will ever live.  

The watchword of the Christmas story is, ‘Do not be afraid’. This is how the angel spoke to the shepherds while it was still night. All is dark, though I imagine the morning star shining brightly in the night-sky. Yet the angels sing, and the shepherds hear; they shed their fear and run to the manger to see this thing that has come to pass. And, says St Luke, when they have taken in the sight that awaits them, Mary and Joseph and the Baby lying in a manger, when they have seen this light shining out of a little tiny Child, and bowed low and worshipped him, they return ‘with great joy’ for all the things that they have heard and seen. In St Matthew, the angel comes to Joseph in a dream, while he slept, so we assume that this appearance too was by night. The message is the same: ‘do not be afraid’ for Mary’s child will be the salvation of the world. To be touched by an angel is to be touched by heaven itself. It puts life in a wholly new perspective. It gives back our long view because at once, life becomes worth living again. There is hope and expectation and joy. We come, we see, we are transfigured.

This can be true for all of us here today. We are here to celebrate Christmas once more and adore the new-born King. Some of us have been doing this all our lives. For some of us perhaps it is a first time. But might we all hear it as if for the first time, rekindle the wonder we saw in the faces of the children who thronged here ten days ago for the Blessing of the Crib? Could a bolt be shot back within us, a door opened, a light break in upon our darkness and our need? Could our wintry hearts be reawakened as the solstice passes and the sun begins to rise within us? Could Christmas change our lives for ever? Could it touch the life of our broken world?

I am appealing to all of us: take the long view of Christmas. See it as the start of something wonderful when angels tell us not to be afraid because of the day that is dawning. And if we find that life is never the same again, it redoubles our efforts to live differently, less selfishly, more truthfully, more kindly, because we are inspired by the spirit of Christmas. We need to believe that changed lives can change history, point to that better world the soldiers glimpsed during that Christmas truce. When the season turns, the solstice is past and the Sun rises upon us, we learn to see things by the new light of lengthening days. Our Advent longings were not misplaced. He has come as he promised, God with us. We meet him, we greet him, we bless him, we understand, we hope, we celebrate, we love. Fear is gone. We know that our joy at his birth will last for ever. 

Durham Cathedral, Christmas Day 2014 (Matthew 1.18-25)

The Secret Ministry of Frost: a sermon on the winter solstice

This solstice day calls for a wintry sermon. We may affect not to care for winter, but painters and writers have always loved it. Here is one of the great English romantic poets.

All seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

That is the beautiful last stanza of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem ‘Frost at Midnight’ written in 1798. ‘The secret ministry of frost’ is one of those happy phrases that once heard, you never forget. But I love that conclusion for its embrace of the entire circle of the seasons. As the earth turns on its axis and we journey through this shortest day of the year, our thoughts inevitably turn to the promise of spring’s light and the greening of the earth, the happy warmth of summer we begin to travel towards tomorrow. It focuses our minds on the order of time running its course, the turning of the seasons, the human cycles of birth and death and all that comes in between.

Advent makes us think about first and last things. That can mean the order of time that is marked by equinox and solstice, by feast day and fast, and by the times and seasons that hold memory or significance for us. But at a deeper level, it means what is of first and what is of ultimate meaning for us and for all humanity. And this is the real purpose of Coleridge’s poem. He is in a reverie, musing by his fireside on how, outside, ‘the Frost begins its secret ministry’ silently, mysteriously, without the help of wind or weather. Inside all is warmth and peacefulness, a calm gently fluttering flame inducing a meditation about what it means to be alive. I guess that one of the gifts of Advent, even this late, is to urge on us how important it is to stop, ponder the wonder of things, the sheer gift of being human, and aware, and capable of thought and generosity and love.

Coleridge has a specific focus for his wonder, for he is not alone by his fireside.

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes!  

His infant son prompts thoughts about his own childhood and upbringing – not an unmixed blessing for Coleridge, sent away from home, deprived of his beloved nature, alienated from his mother. He wants better things for his own child, above all that he will be at home in a beautiful world, and at one with the God who made it and is present in its majesty and mystery, the Creator who will himself shape this precious human life:

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

His prayer is that ‘all seasons shall be sweet to thee’: in youth and in age, for better or worse, happy or sad, disappointed or fulfilled, walking in darkness or seeing great light. What do we not long and pray for when we think of our own children or grandchildren when they are little and still a source of wonder to us? We gaze on them in awe and tenderness, and ask ourselves and God what will become of them when they grow up. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t find ourselves gazing far into the future, hoping that our children will be safe in this precarious world we have brought them into, praying that they will live long and well and happily. What wouldn’t we do to protect them from damage or harm? What wouldn’t God do? we imagine. For each birth, each infancy, each dawning of awareness is a sunrise for the entire human family as well as for a child’s loving parents, family and friends. It is why the hurt, the abuse children suffer at the hands of trusted adults is so terrible, so outrageous. All creation cries out against it, this massacre of innocent children, this massacre of innocence itself.  

On this last Sunday of Advent, we contemplate Blessed Mary and her vocation to be the mother of the Lord. We acclaim her, as Elizabeth did: Ave Maria: ‘blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb’. It isn’t to diminish the force of those words to say that this is the response of every new parent where a birth is waited for with expectancy and joy, like Elizabeth herself looking forward to the birth of her own son. Happy are you, happy is your child, happy your family and community! Mary could not love her Infant more than any other mother loves. She loved, and Joseph loved with her, giving all they had so that their Child would grow strong and flourish. Even when they heard Simeon speak about the shadow that would fall across the holy family one day, the sword that would pierce Mary’s heart, it did not change anything. They loved him just the same. Their hopes and longings for the future were just the same. And like Coleridge, you imagine Mary and Joseph gazing at their firstborn in wonder, filled with thankfulness that God has brought them to this point, offering these tiny hands and feet to God, asking only that he will mould his spirit and shape his life so that he will grow ‘in wisdom and stature and in favour with God and humanity’. And asking that as his feet touch the earth, a new dawn will bathe the world in its sunrise, a light for all nations.  

At each solstice, the Precentor chooses a hymn for the year’s turning. Christ whose glory fills the sky, Christ the true, the only Light. On this day when the sun scarcely clears the horizon, and its warmth is extinct, when darkness is long and spirits low, when nature sleeps, and storm and frost have their way on the earth, it is then that we are roused to pray all the more fervently in the spirit of Advent: Sun of Righteousness arise, triumph o’er the shades of night; Dayspring from on high, be near; Daystar, in my heart appear! All of human life is gathered up in this yearly metaphor of the darkness and cold that will one day be banished as the light lengthens and the warmth strengthens. And in four days’ time, metaphor will become reality. Like the poet, we shall gaze in wondering love upon the beloved Infant, and see in him all grace and truth, all hopes and longings met, and the secret ministry of frost will be past, and hearts will sing, and all seasons will become sweet for us. 

O God, by whose command the order of time runs its course: forgive our impatience, perfect our faith, and help us to have a good hope because of your word; through our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

Durham Cathedral, Midwinter’s Day, 21 December 2014.  Luke 1.39-55

Solstice Reflections: a meditation for midwinter

Durham’s cloister has a curiosity that comes into its own on the winter solstice: a meridian line in the north walk.  It was put there in 1829 by a local headmaster in the days when professional men had the leisure to indulge in amateur astronomy.  At one end, an engraved stone on the ground marks the furthest point reached by the sun’s rays at noon at the summer solstice; a similar mark on the wall indicates the winter solstice when the sun is at its lowest.  So the Cathedral fabric is etched by a line tracking the sun’s journey through the year that follows the passage of time and the turning of the seasons. 

It isn’t unusual for sacred architecture and astronomy to meet like this: the great example is Stonehenge.  The orientation of our churches eastward links astronomy to faith just as the date of Easter does.  At Vézelay, the great Romanesque basilica built at the same time as Durham is constructed in such a way that at the summer solstice, the sun’s rays fall directly on to the centre aisle and create an avenue of light up the church; and today, if the sun is shining, they will illuminate the tops of each of the famous carved capitals on the north arcade as if by spotlights.

John Donne called the winter solstice ‘the year’s midnight’ in his ‘Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’.  He wrote in the era of the Julian calendar, so the solstice fell near 13^th December, her feast day.  When the calendar was reformed, the solstice shifted to the 21^st or near it.  This was St Thomas’s Day which also carried overtones of darkness, doubt and unknowing.  Today’s weather has echoed its sombre theme: the rains and the lowering skies, the lifeless greyscale landscape, the sun obscured for the 4^th day running.  No wonder that in northern Europe our forebears developed midwinter rituals for cradling the fragile light against the ancient threats of darkness, chaos and death. 

Donne’s poem imagines the solstice as a mirror of his human state: the wintry sense that he is not even half-alive.  ‘I am every dead thing’ he says: ‘lean emptiness… re-begot of absence, darkness, death: things which are not’.   Why does he feel so cruelly used?  The answer is, because of the death of a woman friend – or maybe because of the death of the friendship.  Her name was Lucy, Countess of Bedford.  Whatever the reason, he feels abandoned, forlorn, alone.  His sun can never renew itself, climb back up towards its zenith and the summer that lovers love.  For him it is winter: life without love is nothing.  Death cannot be far away.  ‘Since she enjoys her long night’s festival, let me prepare towards her’ he writes bitterly,

And let me call

This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year’s, and the day’s deep midnight is.

Loss and the memory of it are powerful and poignant at this time of year.  But you don’t have to be bereaved to feel the dark creeping over your soul.  Seasonal affective disorder is a real condition, and real too is its spiritual equivalent: that depressive loss of direction, energy, inward vitality that our medieval forebears called accidie, listlessness.  And in that state, we easily fall prey to displacement activity – and this is the real peril of Christmas - anything to mask the emptiness in our hearts, the shadows that hang over our spirits, the undertow of hopeless longings and unfulfilled dreams that haunt us and make us wonder whether we can ever be truly alive again. 

Advent summons us to stop and reflect on who and what we are, and who and what our destiny, now in the time of this mortal life, while we have the opportunity to consider what death, judgment, hell and heaven mean for us. On midwinter’s day we are almost out of time: it is almost too late to prepare. Yet it is not too late, never too late to give voice to the universal human longing: 

O come O come, thou Dayspring bright,  
Pour on our souls thy healing light;
Dispel the long night’s lingering gloom,  
And pierce the shadows of the tomb. 

It is the cry of all people who are without light, who are crushed or hurt or abandoned: the cry for deliverance, help and salvation.  We have heard it with terrible force among the bereaved families of Newtown and the refugee children of Syria. It is the cry of the lost part of our own selves.  It is answered by the promise of a Child who will bring light and life, the Word who in the depths of night leaps down from heaven (as Hippolytus puts it) to illuminate our world’s darkness. 

It is the year’s midnight, and the sun is at its lowest.  But tomorrow the days begin to grow longer.  The light will strengthen once more, imperceptibly at first: for a few weeks it will be an act of faith to believe that one day it could be summer again.  Yet the lengthening light is an image of faith and hope.  And when things are dark and we are tempted to despair, when the poor are with us always and violence is abroad, when terror stalks the lives of many and more still are helpless or in pain, it is precisely then, at this nadir of solstice that we need to recover our hope.  John Donne is right: life without love is empty, without purpose.  But life can begin again because God is with us in the coming of Jesus our Sun of Righteousness. 

So we can trust God’s meridian line to lead us out of the shadows.  At midwinter we can lift up our hearts, for on this day of solstice, the axis of the world is turning back towards the light.