Column: Image to Image: Musings on Faith, Media, and Story
December entry: “Abiding Winter Light”
Column Description: Image to Image: Musings on Faith, Media, and Story is a monthly column that illuminates old and new ideas about media ecology from a Christian perspective. Dr. Mitchell will explore what it means to bear God’s image and Christian witness in a mediated world, with a particular focus on the relationships between theology, media, and orthopraxy across different Christian traditions.
By Chase Mitchell, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Media and Communication, East Tennessee State University
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Abiding Winter Light
Each year, Christmas comes earlier. Our secular liturgies have succeeded in mashing together Advent—what should be a time of waiting—and the Christmas season—when we rightly celebrate God’s inbreaking presence in the Nativity.
For many Americans, Christmas begins the day after Thanksgiving. Trees and stockings and garland and inflatable reindeer are strewn about our homes and communities before the turkey has digested. In our jolly-good fervor, our culture has made the season into a time of impatient excess. We lurch forward at breakneck pace, scrambling to plan, to do, to buy.
Most of our impatience, we tell ourselves, is well intentioned. We plan and do and buy out of love for our families, our friends, and our communities. Fair enough.
But in forgetting how to wait, in rushing to adorn everything in plastic and technicolor light, we’ve forgotten how to pray—to wait on the Light that comes to us in silence, meek, hidden from the foundation of the world. Anglican priest and poet, Malcolm Guite, speaks of Advent’s “wombing darkness.” It’s not a despairing darkness, to be sure, but a darkness nonetheless.
We’re not very good at abiding such “darkness,” and so our spiritual circadian rhythms are thrown out of whack. By the time Christmas Day has arrived, we’re already making New Year’s resolutions, looking for new “light.”
We can learn from a biblical figure that is often overlooked this time of year—Simeon—to reorient our liturgical patterns and, thus, reform our hearts.
Luke Chapter 2 tells us that, eight days after Jesus’ birth, Joseph and Mary took the child to the Temple to have Him circumcised and to make the sacrifice of two turtledoves, as required by the Law. There they encountered Simeon, an aged, righteous man who’d prayed his whole life for God to let him live to behold the coming Messiah.
Simeon prophesied: “Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you may now dismiss your servant in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all nations: a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel” (emphasis mine).
Simeon was an older man, and devout, as Scripture says. He’d waited in patient prayer for God to reveal to him the Light of the world. He was faithful in abiding the winter light—the long, sometimes dim seasons of life—in which God’s glory is not easily discernible.
Where we try to skip, ignore, or illumine the wombing darkness in our own lives, Simeon trusted in patient servitude and hopeful witness. He was able to wait as he did because, as it says in the text, he had received (and believed) God’s promise. His long-suffering prayer, that is, was grounded in the knowledge that God would deliver Him in the fullness of time.
Waiting and obedience cannot be separated; each is revelatory to the degree they inform the other. Only in doing both, prayerfully, is God’s glory made manifest. We cannot forcefully reveal God’s presence in our lives, it’s true. At Christmas, especially, waiting and obedience come together in a unique way. Indeed, it is the only time in the liturgical year when they perfectly coinhere: waiting is obedience.
And so, like Simeon, we must be patient and vigilant in prayer. Abiding the winter light is our task, in this season and the rest. In our long suffering faithfulness, we, too, will encounter the Light of revelation.