December 21, 2013
The Third Week in Advent

My grandmother's parents came to this country from Germany at the end of the 19th Century and settled in the low hills of eastern Iowa, where there was rich farmland on which to build a new life.   But  that new life included some of the old traditions they carried with them from Europe.   Always, at Christmas, they cut down a pine or cedar tree that had grown on their own land and decorated it with candles clipped onto the branches.   After dark on Christmas Eve those candles were lit with great ceremony and with gasps from wide-eyed children, one of whom stood nearby with a bucket of water "just in case."

We no longer use candles on our tree.  Hundreds of little electric lights do the job instead.   Our grandchildren like colored lights, so that's what we have on ours.   Sometimes I sit quietly in the room with the tree at night, still something of a wide-eyed child who feels the wonder of Christmas.    We light the dark with  lights and candles at this darkest time of the year as a sign to ourselves that "the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it."

Today is the Winter Solstice--the shortest day of the year.   I have been getting up in the darkness for many weeks now.    My morning walk is on dark streets, illuminated by an occasional street light.  Today my heart felt lighter as I looked up at the moon over Rogers Pond, shining through the fog.   I cannot tell it yet by looking around.   But I know that the change is happening.   The days will now get longer.   I remind myself that we can't always tell the difference when the balance shifts in our lives.   But the hope is sure.    God's light shines.

Solstice

Winter comes,
and earth's long rest.
We gather
in candled darkness
to sing of a birth
hidden before memory--
a tale of a stable,
and the scent of straw,
and cattle restless, aware
of an unsettling in the old order.
In our darkest times
we sense it, too,
that though the placid moon
and unchanging stars
fill the night again and again,
there is another force
bending time, calling light
to favor the earth,
to stir us all to life once more.
Lord of the dark,
come.
Be solstice to our short days.
Turn the clock of the world again
when we are tired and lost.
Help us to believe—
in forgotten stable and shepherd's field,
in lonely rooms and fearful streets,
in beds of sickness and haunts of war—
the stirring of some promise
that glitters in us like a star,
like a candle on a tree,
like a winter moon's reflection
in our waiting hearts.

 

--Timothy Haut, December 21, 2013