It's not all sweetness and light...

I spent the afternoon with Mary Etta yesterday. She is a poet and a dreamer who has a call to nursing that has been lived out in many places and many ways. Old age and illness have slowed her body down but her spirit runs and leaps still in green fields of joy. Remembrances of our growing up in north Florida and south Georgia ran faster than our mouths could speak. Our age differences are as naught because we share a common history in many ways.
Remember when it was cane syrup making time? The brothers would gather and strip the cane the night before. Everyone would rise early to watch and work as the mule pulled the cane mill and the juice flowed into a barrel. Neighbors and family visited and there was always an adult peeling short pieces of cane for children to chew... candy straight from the fields. The juice cooked in a large, flat iron kettle over a fire that was carefully tended to keep it at the right temperature. I have one of those kettles in my flower bed now. The cane juice would bubble and cook down, constantly being stirred and skimmed. It took talent and knowledge to produce good cane syrup. Just like making candy, you had to know when the right time came to remove the liquid from the heat. And, in those days before candy thermometers and gas fires, it was a knowledge that came with years of watching and doing. Even the masters of the craft could on occasion miss the mark and produce an inferior syrup. Cane syrup and biscuits... Mary Etta and I had watering mouths as we remembered eating the home grown and home cooked cane syrup of our youth.
Advent is cane syrup making time for the soul. We are gathering ourselves together in the pre-dawn darkness, gathering our busy holiday lives up and bringing them to the cane mill at church where we can be transformed. Our juice flows into the kettle and we watch, anticipating the sweetness to come. The rituals of Advent, like the rituals of syrup making, are steps along the way that lead us to new light, a light that returns year after year as we wait and watch for the birth of the Light Bearer, Jesus Christ.
And like the syrup makers of my childhood, knowledge comes with practice. My first Advent celebrations were happy, banner making, table decoration, church decoration, Christmas tree trimming explosions of joy as I waited for the coming of the baby Jesus. As the years have passed and Advent seasons have passed the forty year mark for me, I see more of the skill required to fully celebrate Advent.
This is a season of darkness and light. The Bible is very clear in its description of the time before... Isaiah the Old Testament prophet and Matthew the disciple use the same words... "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death, light has dawned." We sit during these days in the region of the shadow of death, remembering the past and hoping, having faith in the dawning light.
Every morning now when I wake up, it is dark outside my window, too dark to see the mountains in the distance or the dead locust woodpecker tree. If I wait, lie quietly in my bed, I can watch the light come, slowly creeping up over the far mountains until my whole world is once again bathed in winter light. I wake up every morning with hope and faith... hope for the quality of light that will provide warmth and illumination... faith that once again, like so many mornings before, light will come. God said, "Let there be light" and so it has been... light in the star that both marks the place and leads the way to the Christ Child. Mary Etta and I are waiting this Advent season in the darkness before dawn for the star light to shine on us, showing us the way to go, helping us find the stable where Jesus waits for us... new light, fresh syrup for the homemade biscuits of our lives.