Here We Are, In The Dark
What will we learn from this Advent, unique and unrepeatable?
I sit in the dark of the nursery, rocking back and forth in the worn-out glider. The baby-almost-not-a-baby slumbers in my arms, his legs wrapped around my side, his hand flung across his face. I savor the moment, the sacred silence and the holy dark.
It is the first Sunday of Advent, the dawning of a new year in the church. But I have only found its light here in the darkness at day’s end, after a Sunday spent scurrying. Here in the shadows I can finally pray, settling into the quiet beckoning of Advent’s mystery.
Here we are, in the dark.
For twelve years I have rocked in this chair, as every creak reminds me. Each time I held a new baby, I had to relearn everything: how to care, how to heal, how to love, how to nurture. Strangers assume I am some expert on children after this many, but all I know is how much I do not know: how hard it is to forget, how humbling it is to relearn, how holy it is to discover.
After years spent nursing in this same place, what I know now is that each child was different.
I had to learn how to feed each baby all over again, the particular chemistry of our bodies and biology. There was thrush and mastitis, tongue ties and poor latches, blisters and blebs, oversupply and undersupply. I laugh now when I flip through the La Leche book with questions; I have known nearly all the complications.
But I have also known deep peace and profound wonder. The sacred presence in moments like this: a content child dreaming in my lap. The healing mercy of watching my body nurture another. The mystery of mystagogy, glimpsing what he meant when he said: take and eat, this is my body given up for you.
Most of all the power of learning, over long days and sleepless nights clocked in this rocker, what it meant to meet this particular child in their particular needs.
I was never nursing a generic baby, or all my babies at once.
I was only with each one, at a time.
Here we are, in the dark.
What will be our relationship to this Advent?
Not the Advents of years past, our yearning for tradition or the way things used to be.
Not the imagined, idealized Advent we might have had if this year had been different.
But the particular, present Advent, pressing close to us now in the dark.
What will we learn from this one, unique and unrepeatable?
I write these words in the dark, from the dark, for the dark, tapping them out on my phone as the baby snoozes. I want to be present to him, but I also want to be present to this sparking idea, yearning to be written after he yearned to be nursed. So I am holding both: the baby and the words, the darkness and the light.
All of it Advent, pressing close.
The power of the present—in prayer or parenting, in writing or wondering—is rock solid truth, stronger with each upheaving year. “Here we are” feels like the only sure saying in pandemic living.
But Advent keeps our eyes on Emmanuel: God among us. Here and now, everywhere and always, God is pressing close to each one of us, even in the growing darkness, even with our needs and longings, even through our struggles and suffering.
Here we are, in the dark. But here we are, never alone.
What light will we find in this present darkness?
What will Advent bring to us and birth in us this year?
What are we called to give and to receive, from God and each other, even in the dark?
Peace,
Laura
Find my books here: Everyday Sacrament | Grieving Together | Prayers for Pregnancy & Birth | To Bless Our Callings | Living Your Discipleship