Winter Light
Scripture
Matthew 4:12-23
The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.’ From that time Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’
Hygge is all about coziness and the Danes and their Scandinavian neighbors prepare for winter, like really prepare, starting in August. They are consciously cozy rather than wishing they lived in the Mediterranean, they make the most of the winter. Perhaps it started with needing too; needing to store food and fuel and be ready because winter could be beautiful and dangerous. Now Hygge is a season of sweaters and tea and cozy blankets and making the space where you dwell filled with intention. Light is a the first topic of every hygge book out there. Dane’s love candles and fireplaces (they have the most of both) and their designers worked to make light fixtures that defuse light, they love lamps, window nooks and would probably call florescent lights an abomination. They soak in the sun for the hours they can and like Germans they demand natural light in the home and work and school. (There are actually regulations about natural light and workplaces…you can not stick someone in a interior room with a florescent light…like my high school did with all the Social Studies teachers.)
Meil Wiking’s The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living says, “The golden hour is roughly the first hour after sunrise and the last hour before sunset. When the sun is low in the sky, the sunlight has to travel through a greater depth of atmosphere. During this times, it produces a warm, soft, diffused light. It is sometimes called the “magic hour”, and I think I have fallen in love with every woman whose picture I have taken at this time of day for that 1/250 of a second. This is the light you want to aim for if you are going for hyggelig light indoors….It’s better than any Instagram filter.”
Long before Ikea made candles and lamps easy to buy, Northern Europeans prepared for the seasons of long nights celebrating a candle mass. In Ireland the Pre-Christian Goddess Bridget known for fire and spring became the brilliant Abbess of hospitality. While her community makes candles and butter and beer and bread and all the stuff of life, I imagine her rehearsing the stories of Jesus. But she never just reads them, she becomes them and invites us to do the same. She will provide food for Mary and Joseph as they travel, she will serve as Mary’s midwife birthing Jesus, and caretaker of the infant Jesus. As Herod’s troops come to find Jesus and the baby boys in Bethlehem, Bridget dawns a wreath of candles on her head and dances to distract the soldiers while the holy family escapes as refugees to Egypt. Irish churches will forever celebrate her mass in the winter season with offerings of candles to bring light to the long nights.
Further north, the Swedish church honors St. Lucy with a candlemas in December and the highlight is a procession lead by a young women decked in white, with a vibrant red sash and a wreath of candles on her head. She brings light into darkness. Her actual story, or at least one of them, isn’t set in the winter wonderland but in the catacombs of Rome. During the “Great Persecutions” Lucy brought food to Christians hiding and hoping for life, she filled her hands with food and found her way through the dark maze wearing a wreath of candles on her head.
In Wintering, Katherine May, dives into the darker stories associated with St. Lucy, the young Sicilian beauty promised to a noble refuses marriage in favor of her Christina Faith. “Her prospective husband denounced her to the Roman authorities for being a Christian, and the Roman authorities in turn threatened to send her to a brothel if she didn’t renounce her faith. Lucia refused, and when the authorities attempted to remove her to the brothel, they found that she could not be shifted. Eventually, after a team of oxen had failed to drag her one inch, they stacked kindling around her instead and burned her. But nothing could extinguish Lucy’s voice, which chimed on through the flames, proclaiming her faith. A soldier stuck a spear through her throat to stop her, but still the words came. Later stories name her eyes being gouged out, some stories say she did it herself after a suitor admired them. Lucy is a symbol of absolute faith and utter purity, but the sins for which she suffers are not her own. Instead, she shoulders the weight of the male gaze and is destroyed by it. So Lucy dwells in the darkness of the catacombs or in the dark of blindness; she brings the light of the martyr’s pyre or the light of the crown of candles” (May).
A modern candle mass may not share the full story, such gore isn’t really welcome in church…most of the time. Both Lucy and Bridget bring light into spaces that feel utterly hopeless. The stories of our faith are filled with images of light and dark. And this should not be confused with black and white, as it has been in the worst recesses of American Christianity. The Prophet Isaiah preached about people dwelling in deep darkness, in gloom, in a cloud of violence, injustice and harm. The first sermon Jesus preaches is mostly a quote of Isaiah with a one sentence ending, repent for the kingdom of God has drawn near.
The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.’ From that time Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ -Matthew 4:12-23
Jesus isn’t quoting Isaiah because everyone needs to stand out in the hot Mediterranean Sun to get right with God. In fact I often wonder if light as well as dark has moments of hardship for folks who dwell closer to the Equator. Isaiah isn’t hating on darkness because he needs a nightlight, this isn’t literal. They are talking about something much deeper, the brokenness we hold onto and the brokenness we make, the ways we see despair and let it thrive, the way we shame ourselves and others. We create these spaces of domination and destruction and perhaps we need the clarity of light shining in the darkness to make it better. Perhaps we need the star on evening the horizon like the Magi to get the gumption to take a next step towards change.
And despite of that Isaiah still sings out, “Rise, Shine: for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For Darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you. Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn” (Isaiah 60:1-6).
Maybe this season trains our eyes to appreciate the light, like the magi setting a course to the horizon because the light is clarified in the quite curve of evening. Maybe the season sparks us to honor what is essential and to tend the hearth like those so long before us. Maybe this season invites our eyes to the flicking flame that is dappled with light and dark all at once and so very alive. Perhaps we are called like Bridget and Lucy to be the people who bring the food we have and the tender candle light to spaces that fill so full of despair. Perhaps enough of us bring those lights, caring for them and tending the flames that we become a part of Isaiahs dream a community so filled with warmth, tenderness and justice that we make a light all the world can see and stream too, like a lighthouse on a hill, that calls us all to community.
May it be so. Amen.
Reflection prompts:
How do you make the light and dark meaningful in your home? How do you craft space for wellness in the winter?
How to we bring light and life into spaces that long for nourishment, hope and wholness?
How do you care for your self to care for the work of the world?