Sunrise in India

“Although your people live in darkness, they will see a bright light. Although they live in the shadow of death, a light will shine on them.” (Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 4, Verse 16)

Tomorrow in our Church we start Advent, a time of waiting, a time of darkness before the coming of the Light, Emmanuel, and ‘God with us’. Advent is a symbolic time of darkness and waiting for the light of Christ but the experience of darkness and seeking the light is real.

We hear of wars, murders, pain and suffering on a daily basis. There is no amount of shopping or TV that will make these experiences of death go away. They can only be delayed or we can numb ourselves.

Fr. Ronald Rolheiser, an Oblate priest/writer and a friend of my friend Lorenzo Rosebaugh asks the question in a column of the local Catholic newspaper, what we can do when we face a deep loss, like I felt for my son Peter. He says that psychology finds itself helpless and there is not much we can do but stand helpless. He says time does heal but it sometimes takes a lot of time. Besides admitting helplessness and the healing of time, he suggests something the great visionary Pierre Teilhard de Chardin suggested when he suffered the loss of his sister. In a letter at the time he wrote: “I feel that a great void has opened in my life – or rather in the world around me – a great void of which I shall become increasingly aware…. The only way of making life bearable again is to love and adore that which, beneath everything else, animates and directs it.”

For many of us that force of life that “animates and directs” life is what we call God. So I pray this Advent, time of waiting for ‘God with us’, to be able to admit my helplessness and use this time to love and adore God and to express my affection to all the people around me in whom I find this spirit of God. I believe this is the only way to turn this deep darkness into a great light.

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