Candle of love
Today I shall light the third advent candle, often recognised as the’candle of love’, with a focus on John the Baptist. I often think of John’s father, Zechariah. A moment’s lack of faith had deprived him of speech for nine months, and now at last he holds his infant son in his arms. To cradle any infant, especially your own, is to feel a generator thrumming in the crook of your arm – alive with the energy of human possibility. For Zechariah that feeling must have been magnified many fold.
Last year I alluded to Fergal Keane’s delightful ‘Letter to Daniel’ , and I quote from it here:
Since you’ve arrived, days have melted into night and back again and we are learning a new grammar, a long sentence whose punctuation marks are feeding and winding and nappy changing and these occasional moments of quiet.
Your coming has turned me upside down and inside out, so much that seemed essential to me has, in the past few days, taken on a different color. Like many foreign correspondents I know, I have lived a life that, on occasion, has veered close to the edge: war zones, natural disasters, darkness in all its shapes and forms. In a world of insecurity and ambition and ego, it’s easy to be drawn in, to take chances with our lives, to believe that what we do and what people say about us is reason enough to gamble with death. Now, looking at your sleeping face, inches away from me, listening to your occasional sigh and gurgle, I wonder how I could have ever thought glory and prizes and praise were sweeter than life.
The whole thing will repay many readings.
What is true for Fergal Keane, and was true for Zechariah is this: to love is to hurt and there is no way the two can be separated. Maybe this is especially so with the love of a parent for a child, as witnessed in this weekend’s grief in the USA. As the candle of love burns in many a church today, and we celebrate the arrival of God’s incarnate love, there is a sense that the mellow note of pain is not far beneath the sibilant jingle of the Christmas bell.
Aert de Gelder. Image: Wikimedia Commons
