the dark is a door

on advent in the night

Nine years ago now, a night nurse fell asleep in the room where our son slept. The eyes that were there to watch over him, humidifier tubing, pulse oximeter, feed line, closed and did not reopen until I, in my three am haze, woke up to pump on the couch.

What followed was a season of life in the dark. The hours of three am, four, five, are dark in a different way even that the evening hours. They feel empty of life. I sat in his rocking chair typing what would become a book, but at the time was nothing but raging words on a page. I kept myself upright, I kept myself awake. I drank coffee and I hovered over the rise and fall of his stomach, counting breaths, counting life.

I think about the monks who, all over the world, wake for night watches and fill that darkness with prayer. Are they ever cold? Do the nights ever feel empty? Do they ever think, why am I doing this, why am I talking to the void? I think about how those hours must not have been empty of life - is that not when the owl is most at work? - but for me, in the small room where now three children make their home and jump on their beds, there was nothing but dark.

For years I’ve demanded of myself a performance in Advent: the performance of the good mother. I’ve asked myself to make lists of activities, to make magic, to find Christmas lights to drive around and look at, to find winter wonderlands to troop through, to buy hot chocolate, to buy cookies, to insist on it being the most wonderful of all times of the year.

I have failed my own expectations every year: one day, no telling which one, the dark will come in, and I will be unable to do the activity or find the magic. I will tell myself, This will never happen again. And it does.

Maybe the dark has a home in my Advent. Maybe it has a home in yours, too.

This year I did something that feels, to me, almost too radical to believe: I am letting the dark in. We are reading Gayle Boss’s All Creation Waits as a family and each night we light the candles on the Advent wreath and read one page (all we can do), and I am letting the darkness of the night, and the quiet of the not-yet-prepared home and the not-managed-to-do-it activities, in. I’ve let myself remember the empty dark of those early hours. I’ve let myself breathe in the memories of watching my son’s breaths. I’ve let things be unprepared.

At the end of each page of this book, Gayle Boss has written a prayer - “the dark is not an end; it’s a door. It’s the way a new beginning comes.” I am saying this to myself each day and somehow this is what is changing the dark for me. I cannot force the new beginning through a doorway I don’t allow to be there. I must let the dark in. All creation knows, Gayle tells us, that the dark is a season, one that we must embrace and change ourselves for. The animals she writes about: wood frogs and bees, loons and bears - they all change somehow in response to the quickening of the night and the cold.

Why would I, with my animal heart, be any different?

Why would we try to avoid what is true: that some of our life is lived in the dark?

This year, if you are here in the dark with me, if you are asking questions in the watches of the night, if you feel unprepared or emptied or whatever else? I am with you.

And the dark is a door.