Being the Light

 

It's the Fourth Sunday of Advent and we are just a few days away from the longest night of the year. Already at 5:30 in the afternoon, it is dark and the moon has risen and the neighbors have turned on the multicolored lights on their trees and around their windows. 

The darkness this December is almost unbearable:

. . . A scary vertiginous reaction to a Covid shot followed in short order by an automobile accident

. . . The news that the biopsy following the mastectomy had shown something aggressive and that radiation would be needed, after all

. . . The husband and wife, both frail and with worsening health, struggle with back-to-back hospitalizations

. . . And worst of all, the death of a daughter after many, many years of a progressive, debilitating genetic disorder

What do we do with all of this darkness? 

We do what we can to reflect the Light that we wait for. We shop for groceries for the one who cannot drive; we listen to the worries of the woman with the breast cancer; and we join with a group to provide dinners for the sickly couple. We do what we can to illuminate their darkness.

Hardest of all, holding back our own tears, we visit and sit with the bereaved parents. The father, ordinarily the quietest of men, talks at length of his experience when his parents passed and how he had come to understand the purpose of shiva and the importance of mourning rituals. The mother comments that she isn't religious; she is mad at God and we acknowledge the validity of her position. 

When it is time to go home, we ask again what we can do to help. And the mother has a small request: Would we be so kind as to deliver the Christmas cookies to our mutual friends? Each year, starting on the day after Thanksgiving, she begins baking a vast array of cookies, usually twenty different kinds, and she shares them with everyone she knows. We say "of course" and leave with an enormous parcel of individually wrapped packages and marvel that in the midst of the worst pain a woman can suffer, this self-proclaimed non-religious person can think of those whose lives she brightens each year with her baked treats.

"The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."