The first day of Advent - enticed to hope

Dawn?

How much light is needed for it to be dawn?  How clear does the new day need to be, for it to be really dawning?

There was as yet no sign of the sun, no reddening of the horizon, no glory heralding the arrival of the new day.  Just a mere lightening of the sky, the slightest unraveling of the black blanket of night to something more like a thick grey veil.

6:30 AM.  Give or take.

At the back kitchen table I reviewed the liturgy and Powerpoint slides for worship.  I also checked email, venturing to open up to the world by reading the daily posts from several on-line daily-meditation sites.

First Sunday of Advent.  Sunday of Hope.

I think of my wife in the hospital.  Think too of the daughter of our music director facing surgery in just over a week for cancer, of one of the beloved saints of our congregation being moved tomorrow into a nursing home after a long period of dedicated home care by his wife, of different members struggling with illness and anxiety, and of another member who suffered the loss of his younger brother – 87 years old, just ten days ago in P.E.I.

Mostly, though, I think about my wife.  In hospital this time for ten days already and hoping for only three of four more after surgery tomorrow that we hope will bring relief from steady malnutrition and a promise of better health even with a chronic disorder. 

We hope. 

Although she says she dares not hope.  She tries to tell her brain that this, at least, is the plan and it may or may not work.  She doesn’t want to be disappointed.  Doesn’t think she could handle a let-down that big.

I have read others’ experience of hope – that hope is not the expectation of a particular outcome, but faith that out of the darkest night and most traumatic time and regardless even of outcome, God will bring something new, good and unexpected to be.  Will cause, enable, allow, or oversee – whatever verb your theology suggests, some new, good and unexpected thing to emerge from whatever rubble and ashes we suffer and lament.  Something not imagined.  Something we could never have thought of, nor ever thought to pray for.

As I continued to read the meditations about Advent hope, I heard bird song outside.  It sounded like spring.  And still just a little under three weeks before the longest night of the year.

I rose from the table, walked to the door and opened it, and from the doorway looked out over the back deck towards the escarpment behind our house.  Still no sunrise.  But light enough in the pre-dawn grey to see the dense fog that shrouded the tree tops on the top of the ridge just a few hundred feet away.

There was a strange comfort in how closely the fog closed in my vision.  Unable to see far, unexpected to see the whole picture, I was happy for what I could see of the immediate, of the world just close at hand.  It was enough.  Maybe because as I stood at the opened door looking out at the mist-enclosed world of our back yard, the bird song continued.

He, or she, knew a dawn – dawn of a new day, was on its way.

I listened for a minute more.  Listened until the song stopped.

Then I stepped back inside, gently closed the door and offered a brief, heartfelt prayer of thanks.  And of hope.