Season of Light

Photo by Holly Benzenhafer Redford

I am a night person. The glory of a blazened sunset brings anticipation of the first stars in the night sky and the rising moon’s dance of waxing and waning. The night that follows—especially a night in winter—calls me to a certain kind of yearning. The winter nights bear a particular kind of silence. Hushed and weighty, it lingers around the edges of rooms and stands still and present in the brisk, open air. It is a silence of Presence, and it beckons me to enter its shadows. 

Since moving from Mississippi to Massachusetts, USA, eight years ago, I have learned the long nights of winter are a sacred time that hold within them life and death, dreams and restlessness, transformation and pause. In this wintery space, once snow rests upon the ground, the night takes on a different form of darkness. Unlike the fecund, moving shadows of summer nights, the winter night is bright and differentiated with reflected starlight and moon glow upon the New England snow. Trees in gray hues reach bare limbs skyward, and granite boulders sleep within glittering cobwebs of frost. The small living things sleep soundly in hidden places, and nothing returns my gaze but an abiding presence that is always, always there. In these nights, I am drawn again and again to the window, the door, and outside to stand in the snow beneath a crystalline sky, turning in circles within the silence, to dance with Abiding Presence.

These experiences of the wintery night’s play of darkness and light shape my observance of Advent, Christmastide, and Epiphany. Along with other winter festivals and holy seasons in the northern hemisphere, this sacred season of the Christian year is characterized by light. With each week of Advent, more light, more illumination, is brought to prepare the welcome of the Incarnation—Immanuel, God with us—and the season of Christmastide. In my tradition, the Christmas Eve service concludes with each person holding a lit taper and singing “Silent night, holy night,” as we keep vigil for Christmas Day and its season of light. However, the light bears meaning because of its interplay with the long night. Without the night, the light would seem unnecessary. The candle flames in the congregation are beautiful because they dance with the shadows. Light and shadow intertwine just as they do in life. This season of light is holy because it is also the season of life and death, dreams and restlessness, transformation and pause.

Perhaps it is fitting that Christmastide ends with Epiphany’s celebration of the Magi, the three kings bearing gifts, who follow a star. Having moved through the building of light with Advent to the emphasis of light in the celebration of Christmastide, Epiphany welcomes the light of stars upon snow in the long, wintery night. For all the anticipation and excitement of the season, the starlight of Epiphany is a reminder that Abiding Presence was there all along and so will remain.

Editor’s note: Holly Benzenhafer Redford is a spiritual director and an active member of Spiritual Directors International. She serves as a volunteer on the Host Committee for 2012 Cultivating Compassion Educational Events in Boston.