by Jane Cayer, SSND
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the light is waning and the glorious colors of the maple trees have fallen away. The approaching darkness corresponds with the message of Advent as we journey toward the “shortest day” of our calendar, just before Christmas.
Many of us find this liturgical season—filled with quiet, darkness, prophecies, and expectation—our most loved.
One Advent in the 1970s, I received a small book titled The Prison Meditations of Father Delp. Not exactly a reading for the season, but as I read the words of this priest confined in a tiny cell with his hands in chains during the Nazi persecutions, I was amazed at his sense of hope and peace, despite his desire for release.
Fr. Delp was hanged shortly after pronouncing his final vows as a Jesuit, but his writings were smuggled out of the prison with his final vow papers.
I opened the book with curiosity and some skepticism, but I continued to read with eagerness. Fr. Delp’s meditations on Advent and Christmas were like nothing I had ever read before.
This year his words about lighting candles are most relevant. Our world, too, is full of fear, death and destruction, and while we wait for the Christ-light, we need to create some light of our own in our darkest imaginable world.
Translated into English, Fr. Delp’s words speak clearly to us even now: “Light the candles quietly--such candles as you possess--wherever you are, for they are the appropriate symbol for all that needs to happen in Advent if we are to live.”
If we - the child in Gaza, the mother in Israel, the soldier in Palestine, the elderly woman in Ukraine, the extremist in Sudan, the immigrant in the United States - are to live.
We are only connected by a small candle, perhaps, but we are striving for that communion we profess as we create light.
Let the lighting of our candles, wherever we are, become a prayer of faith in the goodness that is hidden in the dark.
