The Dispatch: A Dark Season at Advent: How Earth’s Longest Night Teaches Us to Hope, by Michael Reneau (Managing Editor, The Dispatch) & Hannah Anderson (Author, Life Under the Sun: The Unexpectedly Good News of Ecclesiastes (2023)):

Michael Reneau: For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, today is the shortest of the year. For Christians, the fact that the year’s longest night occurs during Advent—as we await the joy of Christmas—is no mere irony. That thought is part of Contributing Writer Hannah Anderson’s meditation on Advent, darkness, and waiting for light. …

Hannah Anderson: The darkness has been gathering for a while now. It wasn’t particularly obvious at first—a lengthening shadow here, a loss of an hour there. But as the weeks progressed and the hands of time were set forward, an undeniable gloom has settled in and with it, a chill. Things that once flourished in light now lie dormant. We go to sleep in darkness and wake in the same. …

Meteorologically speaking, the winter solstice is easily explained: It is the moment when the Earth’s poles are tilted to their most extreme positions in relationship to the sun, resulting in an exaggerated gap in sunlight between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. While the global South basks in the light of summer, the tilt of our planet’s axis places the North in darkness. …

Those are the facts anyway. But the existential reality of the winter solstice is less reasonable and at least for me, deeply portentous. There’s a heaviness to it, and for some, a visceral despair as the loss of sunlight prompts physiological imbalances in the form of Seasonal Affective Disorder As a child, I remember my father speaking of the encroaching night with a sense of reverence and even humility. My father spent most of his day working outside, so for him the loss of daylight meant the loss of working hours and, to some degree, productivity, which in modern life also implies meaning. “The shortest day of the year is coming,” he’d warn as if he were a prophet and it was his solemn duty to prepare us for what was coming.

I take comfort in the particularly propitious alignment of the winter solstice with the liturgical season of Advent. At least in the Northern Hemisphere, these weeks gradually bring us to the year’s darkest darkness even as they also deliver us to Christmas.

Modern observances often treat Advent as an extension of Christmas, with celebrations and feasting beginning immediately after Thanksgiving, but Christians as far back as the fourth century have prepared for the coming Christ child by sitting in the darkness. Much like the season of Lent, these weeks are for fasting, prayer, and repentance. Strangely enough, we’re supposed to feel unsettled and lost. …

Today, we may sit in darkness, but we wait in hope. Whether you’re feeling the weight of strained relationships, economic pressures, or civil unrest, the invitation of Advent is to know that you are not alone in the darkness. There is a Light beyond us, and that Light is coming to us. So we entrust ourselves, our neighbors, and our world to the God who is Emmanuel—who  has and is and will come. And soon we will celebrate. 

For tomorrow, the turn toward Light begins.

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