Christmas Eve 2022

"Enjoy the darkness."  

We'd done legs-up-the-wall, Downward-Facing Dog, lunges, Warrior 2, Warrior 1, and even a sort-of-half-handstand supported by the wall. It was late-afternoon yoga in mid-December. As I'd come into class, the instructor asked (as yoga instructors do), was there anything in particular I needed today, anything I needed to work on? 

"Slow me down," I said. As usual, I'd rushed to get there. 

"Mentally or physically?" she asked. 

"My brain," I said. "It's so busy."

I rolled out my mat by a corner of the wall, collected a blanket and blocks from the shelves at the back of the room. Five or ten minutes of quiet rest with my legs up in the air, supported by the wall, slowed me down, as did the deliberate practice that followed. 

Yoga classes end with Shavasana, also known as Corpse Pose, where you lie still on your back, relax, and let go. The lights are dimmed and the almost-darkness of the room is comforting and enfolding, something to enjoy, like sleep, but aware.

In these days around the December solstice and Christmas, darkness is everywhere. The house is dark in the morning when I get up. Darkness shows up in the afternoon before 5 p.m. We had a stretch of rainy, gray December days last week where even at mid-day I found myself starting conversations with "It's so dark." In these final days before Christmas 2022, extreme weather is a reminder that winter can be dangerous as well as dark.

But there's light, too. Lights on the Christmas tree. Lights up and down the streets, brighter than used to be thanks to LED bulbs. 

In the last two weeks I've spent time working with the 8th graders who are reading the scripture lessons this evening at the Children's Service of Lessons and Carols at my church. I make sure they understand what they're reading and help them share it out into the congregation. Mostly I remind them to slow down and look up occasionally. Their bright faces will reflect the wonder of this night.  

Contrasts between light and darkness show up often in these Christmastide lessons read year after year. Isaiah prophesies that "the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light." In a reading from Genesis 22 God directs faithful Abraham to consider the stars in the heaven; his descendants will be that numerous. There's the "glory of the Lord" shining around the shepherds as the angel announced Christ's birth over the fields of Bethlehem. There's the light of the star that led the wise men to the unexpected birthplace of the new child king. 

The final lesson, a grand theological summation, is John, chapter 1: 

What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it. (v. 5-6)

Life, light, glory and good news -- memorable images, all good things. 

But what about the darkness? 

Consider the darkness of the manger. My oh-so-Lutheran book group celebrated Christmas last weekend by gathering to read out loud from "Martin Luther's Christmas Book," a collection of excerpts from the reformer's 16th-century Christmas sermons. As he told the Christmas story from the pulpit, he added lifelike details from his own imagination to help his listeners enter the story and have a more intimate encounter with God made human. Mary, he emphasized, gave birth in the dark, with only Joseph to attend her. No water, no light, no midwife. No carefully prepared baby clothes, no place to lay the infant but a manger -- and that manger was in a very dark stable.

Luther's age experienced darkness more directly than we 21st century city-dwellers do. Street lights and headlights light up the roads in front of us, and flashlights on our phones show us where to walk on the way to the bathroom at the campground. We have to drive far out into the country to find the darkness that makes it possible to see the multitude of stars that Abraham saw. We aren't directly acquainted with moonlight nor its absence when the moon is new and all the landscape is in shadow.

But we do know of dark times—metaphorical darkness, times of spiritual struggle, grief, and depression when we are afraid because we are not sure about what's in front of us. Dark in this sense, however, has become a word to use with caution. Blame Jung, blame "Star Wars," blame Christianity -- dark is often used as a metaphor for evil and and has been used as a racist tool for instilling a sense of inferiority in people of color. We could banish the word dark (and perhaps should banish some usages), but that won't make our fears of the unknown go away.  Meanwhile, as Barbara Brown Taylor writes in Learning to Walk in the Darkness,  we miss a lot of truth if we look for God only in the bright and shiny things. 

Christmas Eve brings us to the darkness of the manger where the newborn Jesus emerged from the darkness of Mary's womb into a still-dark place. But in this dark world he was held and supported in Joseph's calloused hands, settled against Mary's softening belly, wrapped firmly and securely in swaddling bands, and laid in a rustic but sturdy trough for feeding animals. Human parents did the best they could for their God-made-human infant. And Mary pondered all the things that happened that night in her heart for a long, long time and recalled them weeping when they laid Jesus in the tomb following his crucifixion.

The list of people I know going through dark times seems longer than usual this December. Perhaps that's because I'm getting older. I've typed "you're in my prayers" into Facebook messages, emails and texts too many times in the last few weeks and felt the dim insufficiency of the message. Really, when are people not being hit hard by loss, grief, illness, failure, days of reckoning? 

The first Christmas in my life that was like this was in 1983, when my 57-year-old father was diagnosed with a brain tumor that would take his life well before spring appeared. One of his gifts to me during that dark time was a closer acquaintance with Paul Gerhardt's hymn "Once Again This Night My Heart Rejoices." There are many stanzas, most of which no longer appear in Lutheran hymnals. But this is the relevant one:

Hark! a voice from yonder manger, 

Soft and sweet, doth entreat, 
"Flee from woe and danger;
Come and see, from all that grieves you
You are freed; all you need
I will surely give you."

I was young then and in the year that I grieved for my father, I looked for an end to the darkness, the time when I would emerge again happily into the light and return to a life disturbed only by more quotidian problems. 

But if you follow Luther's imagination, his story-telling, you have to picture that voice promising freedom is coming from a dark manger. To come and worship the child who lives there means entering that darkness, not sure of where to put your feet, not sure if there's clean straw where you'll kneel. You're trusting a voice you can't see; it's a baby, a voice you can't understand except on the most basic level of wired-in empathic responses to newborn cries and needs. 

I've been working on this blog post for ten days now, wondering where it would end up, trying to make it come out some place where "enjoy the darkness" would make some kind of sense. It's 5:45pm on Christmas Eve; the darkness has fallen here in Illinois and a beautiful choral arrangement of "Silent Night" is playing on Spotify. The setting is right, but much as I feel this blog post should arrive at a satisfying ending tonight (like a Hallmark Christmas movie), I don't have one. 

It's Christmas Eve. It's dark. It's unknown. But God is here—whether it's in the eyes-closed Shivasana, Corpse Pose, of yoga practice, in eyes-closed prayer for others, or in very personal encounters with grief, sorrow, death and dying this Christmas tide. 

May you find all you need in the Christ Child this Christmas.