In this image I see, and feel, the powerful combination of nature's stillness, the play of light and shadow, the palette of colours in the change between late autumn and encroaching winter, and the inner rhythms of a heart attuned to the church year. On a frosty blue-sky day in North-East Scotland, walking in the forest in early morning or late afternoon in December, is to risk walking unexpectedly into Advent.
When I encounter the interplay of light and shadow, and listen to a silence woven through the stillness, occasionally interrupted by the movement of robin, wren or coal tit, there is an inner ache of longing, an urgent call to relinquish urgency, a summons to pay attention from the Love which imagined and made happen such beauty, distilling the eternal to this precise moment. And in that moment of time, in a frosted, sunlit forest, when the beauty of light arrests the heart and apprehends the mind, God speaks words of comfort into those places where shadow and sadness dwell.
"Comfort, comfort my people, says your God....and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed." (Isaiah40.1) If ever words were made visible by Light as well as made audible by Love, it was these words of the Prophet Isaiah. Exiled hearts, broken by sorrow and exhausted by the work of hoping are told "the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all humanity will see it together." Later he will send a wake-up call to those who have become so used to that inner sluggishness of spirit that is sadness verging on despair: "Arise, shine for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you." (60.1)
So when I go walking in a forest a few days before Advent Sunday and look at shafts of light slicing through the canopy of winter gloom I have Isaianic moments. Years ago I took to that technical attributive adjective, and have used it since for those moments when the way the world looks is changed by moments of vision, when the heart pays attention and is surprised by the comfort of hope.
I've learned to sense the presence and nearness of God in such moments of unlooked for consolation. Not unprayed for, and not unhoped for - but moments when prayer is answered at the least expected moment. We all have our inner shadows of sadness, those sorrows that perhaps we don't tell, except to the most trusted, because they are unable to be adequately described. We live with them simply because they have become part of who we are. But they are not what defines us finally and fully. Out of them arises a longing for...well we don't always know what.
But in places of winter sunlight in a frosted forest in late November, on eve of Advent, some of my own ache of longing was gathered up into a vision of beauty. Light is such a swift and powerful antidote to darkness: "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it." I prefer the King James rendering, "The light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not." (John 1.5) Darkness lacks the capacity to understand light, let alone extinguish it.
This year as much as any year of my life, Advent comes as promise, hope, comfort in answer to our sadness, anxiety, fatigue, and the pervasive sense of loss. "The glory of the Lord shall be revealed," like shafts of winter sunlight in an ancient forest. "Arise, shine, your light has come..." Against the uncertainties that surround us, look for the Isaianic moments.
Up the road the family has had their garden in technicolour lights for a fortnight. That too is a form of longing, anticipating the coming of Christmas, pushing back darkness and insisting on early lights. My Advent is a sunlit frosted forest; theirs is LED reindeer, Santa and sledge, snowman, and Christmas tree. We share the experience of waiting, longing, hoping and living through what life is for us now. May the glory of the Lord shine on them, and our neighbourhood, our world, and into the deep places of our own hearts.
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