A Still Small Point of Light ~ Celtic Advent Day 12

Lighting the first Advent candle, Wiki Commons

Today has been Advent Sunday, the first of the four Sundays in our familiar modern Advent. I have had the sweetest of days, which began at the Church of the 2,000 year old Grandmother Yew in a small village not far from here.

St Nicholas ~ Church of the Grandmother Yew

The church is dedicated to St Nicholas, whose feast day is on December 6th, & so we celebrated his generosity with the sharing of shiny chocolate coins.

Gifts from St Nicholas 

And we all wore our festive hats! Naturally I took the opportunity to put my antlers on.

And we sang one of my favourite hymns, 'O Come, O Come, Emmanuel'.

But it matters not to become too festive just yet, even after today's little flurry. Advent is a time of waiting, of allowing longing, even for those of us who have been journeying through the older Celtic Advent for two weeks already. Everything is born in the dark, and Advent starts with a seed and ends with a star, from small beginnings to an 'ending' as vast as the sky, but even then we will still be sitting in the dark. How else will the seed germinate, the star show us the way, how will we nurture the newborn spark if we rush headlong for the light? Which brings us back to the four Sundays of Advent.

One of the lovely traditional activities of Advent is lighting the candles of the Advent wreath, or Advent Crown. The wreath is traditionally made from evergreens and with four candles, often coloured violet and/or rose, or sometimes a fifth white one to act as the 'Christ candle', placed around it. One candle is lit each Sunday of Advent, and the fifth on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. This takes place in both homes & churches, the light increasing amongst us each week until the Sun & the Son are reborn at Midwinter. Until then we trust and we hope, as our ancestors have before us for thousands upon thousands of years.

The concept of the Advent Crown originated with 16th Century German Lutherans, although the wreath that we would recognise came into being in the 1800s. It seems that Johann Hinrich Wichern, a German Protestant pastor who worked with the urban poor, invented the Advent wreath as a way to reassure the children at his mission school that Christmas was indeed coming, and so encouraging not to ask for a progress report every day. This first wreath was made from an old cartwheel, turned on its side and with 20 small red and 4 large white candles around the rim. Each day a red candle would be lit, and each Sunday a white one. This evolved into the smaller wreaths with five candles that we know today.

The candles symbolise the increase of the light in the world but each also has its own individual meaning, which are Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. There are variations on the theme, such as Faith, Prepare, Joy, and Love, or Prophets, Angels, Shepherds, and Magi. I read today, shared by author and preacher Sarah Bessey, of another theme from the ancient order of Carmelite nuns, who are dedicated to lives of contemplative prayer & who focus in Advent on Waiting, Accepting, Journeying, and Birth. This feels like a more gentle, slower movement towards the light, one which embraces the dark and the unknowing.

But, what of the more familiar theme for the first week of Advent, that of Hope? I know that many are losing, or have lost, hope in these times. Daily I hear about something which threatens to dim the stars, tumble me into a darkness without seeds. I sit with that, because even that darkness calls for attention, and then I take a deep breath and fall into hope once more. It came to me some time ago that to hope is one of our most sacred tasks; Love pervades everything, always, but hope is a spark that can be blown out, or allowed to die. I once read of humans being 'the ones who carry ochre', but we are also the ones who kindle hope. Refusing to enter the darkness where hope has gone cold prevents our longing to relight the flame of hope. Instead, we warm ourselves on shallow, surface things; materialism, greed, power. For the want of a still small point of light.

I have more to say about kindling hope, and how to nurture that newborn flame in ourselves and the world around us, but for now I will end with a quote from American writer Rebecca Solnit.

"Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the Earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal...to hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable."

And so, we kindle the flame on the first candle of our Advent Crown for Hope. The world isn't filled with light, not yet and maybe not anytime soon. But, for another turning of the year, we commit ourselves to the future, and here is a still small point for us to focus on. Let's help one another keep it shining in the dark.


References:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advent_wreath

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advent

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/prehistoric-use-of-ochre-can-tell-us-about-the-evolution-of-humans

Sarah Bessey ~

https://sarahbessey.com

https://www.instagram.com/p/B5iYffCBaWr/?igshid=3e36r4mnnyln

Rebecca Solnit ~

http://rebeccasolnit.net