Yesterday was the solstice, the shortest day of the year; Heather’s father died last Sunday; and we’ve received various other pieces of bad news over the last few weeks. It would be easy, under the circumstances, to give way to fear and sorrow and the belief that we are surrounded by darkness. But I want instead, on the eve of Christmas Eve, and in the wake of Heather’s last post, to talk about light, in particular the light and joy and comfort of love, in particular our love.

Heather and I were classmates and fellow English majors at Williams College. We started dating during the spring of our senior year, which means, for those of you keeping score at home, that we’ve been together for thirty years now, though we didn’t bother to get married until 1985. But I first noticed her during our sophomore year, when we were both taking a course called “Religion and Literature,” taught by a formidable scholar named Barbara Nadel.

Now, neither of us had any business being in this course; we knew very little about literature, despite having declared ourselves English majors, and even less about religion. The course was one of those three-hour seminars that met one afternoon a week, while the syllabus included inscrutable writers like Paul Tillich, Bernard Meland, and Wallace Stevens, which meant that at the end of each class I knew even less than I had at the beginning. The upside was that, since I never had the slightest idea what was going on, I had lots of time to stare at girls, and Heather—glamorous, sophisticated, obviously way out of my league—immediately caught my eye.

She clinched the deal, unwittingly, on the last day of the semester. Babs Nadel, as we irreverently referred to her, had assigned us a final paper, and Heather, as she admitted later, had put it off until she was forced to stay up all the previous night writing it. Moreover, she had come down with a severe cold, which left her severely congested. The combination of lack of sleep and a head full of cotton wool meant that when she came to class that afternoon she sought out the largest individual in class and sat behind him, hoping to avoid catching Babs’s eye. (Babs, terrifyingly, would call on people at random to answer the incomprehensible questions she posed.)

Somehow, Heather had gone that entire semester without once being called on, but of course her number came up on the last day of class. Babs asked some particularly knotty question—I don’t remember what it was; probably something about Stevens—and called on Heather, who had by now slipped into something approaching a comatose state.

Heather later described the awful sensation of gradually coming to consciousness to realize that everyone in the room was staring at her expectantly, apparently awaiting her response to a question she hadn’t even heard. She completely whiffed, of course, and it was at that moment that I said to myself, “THAT’s the girl for me—she’ll never know what hit her!” It took me another two years to wear down her resistance—today I’d probably be arrested as a stalker—but when she finally crumbled, just a few months before we graduated, she quite literally made me the happiest young man in the world.

(Warning to our kids: you probably shouldn’t read this paragraph.) When we first started dating, of course, we were completely in lust with each other, in that embarrassingly hormonal way of young lovers. (When recalling our younger selves, I always think of the Austin Lounge Lizards song “The Golden Triangle,” which contains the lyric “two bodies were thinking with only one gland.”)

Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, that intense youthful passion settled into a steadier, more consistent condition, something like, well, love. We’ve certainly had our ups and downs since then, but the former have vastly outnumbered the latter. We’re still happily married (to each other, I mean); we have three beautiful, thoughtful, and compassionate children; in Madroño Ranch we’ve found a fulfilling, challenging, and just-plain-fun project on which to collaborate now that our nest has emptied. Life, in short, is pretty damn good.

Except, of course, when it isn’t. This is traditionally the season of giving, but this year it has been even more disjointed and chaotic than usual, and we haven’t been feeling terribly festive. I finally decided, just yesterday morning, that the best and most meaningful gift I could give Heather was an attempt to tell her how much I love her, and how much she’s meant to me.

Heather has given me gifts all year round, for thirty years now. The greatest gift of all, however, is one that I have not yet fully unwrapped. I’ve always been of a somewhat gloomy disposition, inclined to see the downside of most situations. (“Expect the worst and you’re seldom disappointed” has been my motto.) Heather, on the other hand, always projects optimism, always expects things to turn out better rather than worse. When I was younger, and for an embarrassingly long time, I tended to think that such a stance was an indication of shallowness and/or naïveté, but slowly, over our years together, I’ve come to realize that it is exactly the opposite. It is, in fact, a conscious and deliberate choice, a rigorous and gallant determination not to give in to darkness and inactivity, but to bestow grace and hope by stubbornly shining light on everyone and everything around you.

I know that my pessimism has often frustrated and disappointed her, and I’m not sure I’ve ever told her how much I admire her patience, her forgiveness, her determination, her spirit, her steadfastness, her depth. I have learned so much from her; I still have so much to learn. Sometimes it can seem that darkness is all there is, but now I know better. Now I know that where there is love, there is always light.

What we’re reading
Heather: Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night
Martin: Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Jesus said to them… “But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” (Mark 13:24–25)

These were among the words that greeted the Christian New Year a couple of Sundays ago, the beginning of the Advent season. Well, dang, commented some of us who meet after the 9 a.m. service at All Saints’ Episcopal Church to discuss the readings. We might as well fold up our tents and go home if this is what the season’s bringing.

By the end of the discussion, we surprised ourselves by agreeing that there’s something oddly reassuring about the passage in which these verses are embedded, despite the Episcopalian squeamishness often evoked by the apocalyptic Jesus. All this talk about judgment and suffering is fine coming from John the Baptist—what can you expect from someone who eats locusts? When Jesus talks about judgment and end times, however, I get linear, literal, and cross. The world didn’t end. Jesus was wrong. Untrustworthy. Oh, forget it. I’ll just sit here alone in the dark.

But eventually I have to note the quotation marks around the darkness-coming passage, which means that Jesus is not just throwing wild predictions around. He’s quoting scripture, from the times when other prophets saw God’s people careening off toward the wilderness without so much as a water bottle. The world did not come to an end after Isaiah used this imagery eight centuries before Jesus used it, something Jesus probably noticed. Nor did it come to an end after Ezekiel or Joel used it in the interim centuries. It was (and is) poetic language used to jolt people out of their open-eyed, daylight sleepwalking. Wake up! There is darkness around and within us, but it’s not what we think it is. There is light as well, and it too is often not what we think it is.

In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s most violent border city, angels have taken to landing at crime scenes, at busy intersections, even on the International Bridge. They stand about ten feet tall, with wide feathered wings, and carry signs that say things like “Murderers, Believe and Repent.” The fact that these angels are actually teenaged members of Salmo 100 (Psalm 100), a tiny evangelical church, doesn’t make them any less impressive: in fact, I think it makes them even more so. Frustrated with the lethal violence that flays their city and with the flabby ineffectiveness of public policy, these young people persuaded the city to donate old office curtains that they turned into robes, raised money for make-up and feathers, and began their work of shocking people awake—particularly those who continue to perpetrate and permit the demonic activities that so plague the city. Their performances are beautiful and dangerous: they stand without speaking, without means of defense, in places where they are very likely to encounter the demonic forces unraveling their world.

They have seen the sun and the moon cease to give light, seen the stars fall from the sky. They have seen the signs that their world is charged with darkness, but they have chosen an energy source beyond the darkness.

Most of us have seen the skies go dark on at one time or another; most of us have had times when it seemed that the world is going to end. What our little discussion group decided that Jesus was saying was that that there are times when the skies go dark and the world seems torn from its course. These times are unavoidable. But don’t think that darkness defines the whole nature of reality, or you’ll pull from a limited energy source, see from a restricted field of vision. Sometimes it takes darkness to remind you that there is light, and that you want to see it.

It’s easy to think about the darkness simplistically. I do it myself, noting the physical and spiritual relief that the pre-solstice days bring from the scorching Texas sun. I’ve noted that most things, including us, need darkness in which to grow. But I also hearken to Wendell Berry’s pithy distillation of the full power of the dark:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings
and is traveled by dark feet and wings.

Most of us—used to light, to a particular, merely visual way of seeing—have definitions of darkness that are inadequate to its full reality. Although there is blooming in the darkness, there are also things fully worthy of terror. Because we can’t see in the darkness the way we’re used to seeing in the light, we often have trouble discerning what blooms from what bites. And sometimes it’s the same thing.

In his book The Blessing: A Memoir, the poet Gregory Orr recounts the stunning journey of his life into the darkness, beginning when, at the age of twelve, he killed his brother in a hunting accident. His brilliant, erratic, meth-addicted physician father and his depressed mother, who died in surgery a couple of years later, were not able to help lead him through the dark, in which he lived persistently until an incident after he returned to the upstate New York village he called home after a shocking experience with Mississippi state police in a civil rights protest in 1965. When he got back, he found that many of the people he’d known all his life wouldn’t speak to him because of his civil rights work. The darkness he’d lived in deepened; he wore the mark of Cain.

At the end of the summer, before he left to go back to college, one of his high school English teachers invited him on a drive. She took him to the property of a sculptor who had died earlier that year. Ignoring the “No Trespassing” sign on a barbed wire fence, they climbed into a field filled with metal figures, suggestive of but not restricted by human form. He and his teacher wandered for an hour through the field. Thought Orr:

… these were soldiers of art. They brought no mayhem—only a longing to rise up and stand inside meaning as a man might stand in armor. There would be no violent struggles here. This was a field of blessing. A field where the mortal and fallen rose up, transformed…. Here in this field, arrayed in long lines, was an army of art. This army was engaged in a war against the nothingness and indifference of the universe. It wasn’t the kind of war history fought, where timing was everything and the clocks ran on blood. This was a war outside of time. It was a war where you didn’t fight, or march, or do violence to anyone…. Somewhere in this field was a rendering of each agony and exultation [the sculptor] had ever felt. And I could feel them, too. I knew that somewhere in this field Cain stood; somewhere else, his slain brother.

Our discussion group came to an equivalent conclusion about the disturbing, apocalyptic words of Jesus. (At least, I think we did.) He was offering his soon-to-be-tested disciples consolation: do not think that the coming darkness is all there is. His advice to them: stay awake. Stay awake to the angels that land in front of you, insisting that there is a way toward meaning. Stay awake to the power behind love, beauty, forgiveness, and mercy that moves in the dark and beyond it. Do not let the darkness consign you to indifference or despair. Stay awake.

What we’re reading
Heather: Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
Martin: Calvin Trillin, Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff

Although it’s sometimes hard to tell, we’re in the season of rising light.

Some of us have a confused relationship with this time of year. The prevailing story, at least in Western culture, has a particular purchase on anyone who’s lived through a northeastern, Midwestern, or Great Plains winter: that story relates the flare of cheer in the Christmas season, followed by a plunge into the long, dark, depressing slog of January, February, and March. People who live in this story yearn for sunlit beaches, skimpy clothing, and drinks with little umbrellas in them, reminding them of what they’ve temporarily left behind. Anyone with aching snow-shoveling muscles in New England after this week’s blizzard will attest to the power of this story of the season. The rising of the light—the lengthening of days—is a promise of kinder times ahead.

Many of us in central Texas long—perversely, perhaps—for this story to ring true here as well. (I’m wife or mother of some of them.) We yearn for a white Christmas, and when the late December temperature creeps up to the 80 degree mark, we moan, “It’s not supposed to be like this! It’s supposed to be cold!” Despite the prevailing story that cold and dark are to be dreaded, in central Texas this is the season to yearn for, the season of dark and (intermittent) cold. For at least some of the year, it’s the light and heat, not the cold and dark, that can be downright unpleasant, almost unbearable. I feel that our winter and spring (so compressed they can be conflated) are the equivalent of fall in New England: tourists come and say, “How beautiful!” but the natives sigh, knowing that what’s just ahead will require some toughness to get through. Here it can be a real pleasure to burrow into the dark; the rising light brings with it a whiff of the (probable) scorching to come.

My musing on light has its roots in non-climatological terrain as well; Martin and I are in a group that’s reading and discussing Genesis: Translation and Commentary, by Robert Alter. Although there’s no particular comment on that most famous of first utterances, Let there be light, I can’t help but think about what it might mean that light is the firstborn of creation, at least according to Jews and Christians. This light is distinctive from sun- and moonlight, which weren’t created until the fourth day, and which seem to be subordinate to the aboriginal light of the first day. As God’s breath hovered over the waters, over the deep, and the darkness, God spoke, and there was light. And God saw the light: presumably this means that God had not experienced light before this moment, although virtually everything I just wrote—God, experienced, light, before this moment—should probably be in quotation marks or resting upon a tower of footnotes. But according to this story, light is humanity’s older sibling, both of them created by that which knew the deep, the dark, the tohu-bohu before they did in a distinctive way: before the light.

I’ve also been lurching my way through Marilyn Robinson’s elegant new screed Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self, in which she argues against what she sees as an absurdly reductive definition of the human brain and mind by some, perhaps many, modern scientists, a definition that refuses to take into account what she calls “that haunting I who wakes in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose behests we answer to so diligently.” This “haunting I,” so profoundly felt, is dismissed by those scientists (or “parascientists,” as she calls them) as mere subjectivity or, worse, evidence of the annoyingly persistent and primitive superstition we moderns call religion.

In one of those serendipitous encounters with my subconscious, as I reread Robinson’s description of this persistent human sense of hauntedness, of leasing interior real estate to someone you recognize but don’t really know, I read the next sentence completely wrong. She writes: “Our religious traditions give us as the name of God two deeply mysterious words, one deeply mysterious utterance: I AM.” Except at first, I read “I AM”—God’s own self-definition—as “1 A.M.”

I AM often awake at 1 a.m., in the deepest dark of the night, the time when most of us know ourselves to be haunted. If you awaken at 1 a.m. with a dream vibrating in your mind, the dream stays with you in ways that it doesn’t when you wake to light. Sometimes you can play with the dream, poke and shape it in ways that make it pop when it encounters daylight. Sometimes at 1 a.m. you can be wide awake and create as complicated a nightmare as any dreaming mind can produce. To stalk the mind at night—at least, for some of us—is to move as close to the realm of tohubohu, of aboriginal chaos, as created beings are able to get, at least without ingesting psychotropic drugs or harrowing the hell of human atrocity.

Despite the categorical confusion it causes, this season may be my favorite, if for no other reason than the blade-bright light of late afternoon, especially as I get to see it from the kitchen window at Madroño. The copper and golden grasses of the pasture in front of the house blaze as the sun drops behind the western hills, each shoot seemingly sharp enough to pierce the chests of the bison passing across it. The bison themselves look like something out of an ancient dream, not the product of my own tiny experiences but arising from some atavistic communal memory. There are those who might pooh-pooh these moments as fanciful or irrelevant to anything “real.” But in this time of rising light, this time between sleep and waking, between the relief of winter and the slog of summer, I’m compelled to remember that light and humanity once inhabited the same chaotic womb, that we rise and fall together. It’s a good season, once you’ve written your thank-you notes, to watch the rising light with gratitude for the family of creation. And with resignation, too: if it’s already January 14, August will be here before we can even blink.

What we’re reading
Heather: Cynthia Bourgeault, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity
Martin: Keith Richards with James Fox, Life