Sources of Light

These little machines appeared on the field that I pass daily on my walks between home and school. With the semester drawing to a close, and the late autumn weather bringing an end to the season of nighttime outdoor sporting events at Boston College, I figured that these mobile "night sun" lamps were being staged for storage until the spring. Sure enough, as I walked home yesterday after turning in two final papers, a pair of flatbed trucks were parked on the field, and a forklift was methodically loading these generator-fed lamps for their journey back to a rental company's warehouse.

Our human society has developed so many sources of illumination. But do they all shed light on our path? Street lights are one thing, but not all lights that glow forth from the façades of our cities and towns are above questioning. Holiday advertising campaigns stress all that could make us merry and bright, but do they invite us to consider where that materialistic glow might fade into shadow? A variety of voices competes to address the issues of violence, prejudice, injustice, and political tension that have filled so many days and nights these past few months, but how many of them truly shed light on our own complicated involvement in these vexing social ills?

The Advent season invites me to live more by the forms of natural light that, while I can neither purchase nor possess them, are most fully my own. At Boston's 42-degree northerly latitude, Advent coincides with the shortest days of the year... bottoming out at just over nine hours of daylight on the winter solstice. Not long past three in the afternoon (or in the early evening, if one is overly cynical), the sun is clearly diving toward the horizon, generously spilling its fiery glow throughout its steady descent. The deep blue sky that chases sunset or precedes sunrise somehow retains sufficient light for walking, running, or reading by a window. The calmness that it instills brings a hush to the disquiet and anxiety, inviting me to turn away from the immediacy of rented light, and instead to contemplate and welcome a subtler, holier glow that arises from within as well as from without.

Advent readings describe Jesus as the light of the world. In a period when the cosmological dance of light and dark gives the latter its deepest lunge, and at a time when our nation and many others seem more deeply caught in the murky swirl of sin and discord, perhaps we can consider anew the lights by which we live, and the source of the true light that is ever coming into the world.