Lambent: Emerging from Darkness
Lambent: Emerging from Darkness
Easter morning, we took the Christmas tree down...The light we'd yearned for, mustered and conjured during a seemingly endless, global tenebrae had arrived.
Easter morning, we took the Christmas tree down.
It had been up since the day after Thanksgiving—four months and change. For our first (and please God, last) COVID Christmas, we put the tree up weeks earlier than usual, saying we needed all the light we could get. Then we left it up longer than ever before—for months after Epiphany, as the liturgical calendar turned to Lent, and Lent became Tenebrae—because we still needed the light.
The seven-foot flocked and pre-strung with LED fairy lights “lifelike” tree (our first faux fir in decades, because venturing to a Christmas tree lot in in late November 2020 was too risky for immunocompromised folks such as we), remained illuminated day and night through the Easter Vigil, just as it had since a few days before Advent.
It was an act of defiance and stubborn hope in equal parts.
A fake tree. A very real light.
Although we didn’t attend any communal Easter Sunday service this year, in person or online, when paschal candles around the globe had been lit, it was time to unplug the tree and pass the torch—one source of hopeful, perpetual light exchanged for another.
As I disassembled our steadfast, if ersatz, tenenbaum, a beam of sunlight bounced off the ocean in the distance, its brilliance momentarily blinding me as I stood on a step stool, placing a fistful of silver plastic tinsel in a ziplock bag to save for the next advent. I reached out to steady myself, jostling the tree. Dozens of owl ornaments illuminated by sea reflected sunlight, glittered and danced among its branches, splashing the walls with tiny rainbow prisms.
Light reflected, refracted, and disbursed like drops of holy water flung from an aspergilium, each a blessing randomly bestowed.
Blessings not just for the ones who kneel, luckily …
Those few seconds where at once I observed light transformed and felt somehow transfigured by it, reminded me of a poem by the late British writer Geoffrey Hill: “Christmas Trees” from his 1978 collection Tenebrae:
Bonhoeffer in his skylit cell
bleached by the flares’ candescent fall,
pacing out his own citadel,restores the broken themes of praise,
encourages our borrowed days,
by logic of his sacrifice.Against wild reasons of the state
his words are quiet but not too quiet.
We hear too late or not too late.
In the poem, the reader is transported to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s cell in Berlin’s Tegel Prison, where he spent much of the last 18 months of his life before he was executed by a Nazi hangman at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 8, 1945—two weeks before Allied forces liberated the camp.
The “flares” Hill mentions were marker flares dropped by Allied forces during a bombing raid. Bonhoeffer described the flare lights as “Christmas trees” in a letter he wrote from Tegel recalling a November 1943 bombing raid that he experienced while locked inside the prison.
In Hill’s imagining, the lights that were, in reality, harbingers of death and destruction are transformed into something hopeful, just as the tiny prison cell becomes Bonhoeffer’s “citadel.”
It depends, I suppose, on how you look at it. Literally and figuratively. Bonhoeffer had eyes to see. The poet wonders whether we might have ears to hear, as well.
In one of his letters from Tegel, Bonhoeffer wrote that a prison cell was a good analogy for the season of Advent. “One waits, hopes, does this or that—ultimately negligible things—the door is locked and can only be opened from the outside,” he wrote.
In the Christian tradition, Advent and Lent have much in common, even as they bookend Jesus’s story of birth, death, and resurrection. They’re both liminal spaces in which we must abide—waiting, patiently or not, for a new beginning and a new season, for the freedom to move beyond our confines, for our story to continue.
In his annual Easter letter to the church, the Rt. Rev. John H. Taylor, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, compared the 13 months of COVID lockdown, with its deprivations, losses, and griefs, great and small, to living through a “sixty-week Lent.” And yet, as Easter approached, the bishop noticed “small miracles” emerging.
Even during the solemn days of Holy Week, Easter flowers were blooming. When I called a bishop colleague, he was out to lunch with his daughter. The senior warden of one of our parishes had traveled to the Bay Area with his spouse to babysit their grandchildren. A colleague at one of our affiliated organizations planned to spend the weekend with longtime friends, celebrating a birthday. These were small miracles, routines once taken for granted, given up for a sixty-week Lent. Hearing their stories conjured a mental image not of the Easter bunny but a turtle peeking out from under its shell after a long winter, he wrote.
We are now, in light of Easter (and the hope that it and vaccinations bring to a wounded, traumatized world), being invited back to what we love, he says. Whether it’s the embrace of a family member you haven’t been able to hug in nine months, taking a long road trip after a year of being confined to your house or neighborhood, or choosing your own apples at the grocery store after months of having brave online shoppers—BLESS THEM AND KEEP EVERY ONE OF THEM—do it for you, a return to the people, places, and practices that sustain us in myriad ways and that we’ve had to give up for longer than most of us ever could have imagined, is nigh.
It’s no return to normal. Nothing will ever be “normal” again, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The world as we knew it has been transformed for better and for worse.
Meanwhile, millions of people around the world still wait for the freedom and assurance that vaccines bring. How long they must wait is a question that should trouble each of us and we must do our part in whatever way we can to make sure the wait is as short as possible.
Bishop Taylor put it this way:
May we also remember those who have died and those still at risk, from essential workers in our neighborhoods to millions around the world who will have to wait months or years for the vaccine.
When Jerusalem’s exiles returned from Babylon centuries before Christ and rebuilt their temple, they resolved as well to build back better beloved community, to do better by the sojourner and all those on the margins. … By God’s grace, the joyous work of reclaiming our blessings will make us hungrier to share them.
Whether it's strands of twinkle lights hung on a Christmas tree, the “new flame” lit during an Easter vigil, or a lamp left on so a loved one doesn’t have to return to a dark house, light in all its forms is meant to be shared, spread, amplified.
As we collectively emerge from darkness after a global tenebrae that felt like it might never end, may we remember that, even when we can’t see it, there is a light in the darkness—lux in tenebris lucet.
Don’t let it go out.
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Thank you for reading. #LuxInTenebrisLucet
From the song “City of Blinding Lights,” from the album How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, by U2, 2004.