An Advent Letter

A letter to my friend John on the first week of Advent

Dear John,

Yesterday at church, I choked up during the lines of the first song, that aching prayer for God to “disperse the gloomy cloud of night, and death’s dark shadow put to flight.” The old seer Isaiah had already begun turning the screws earlier in morning prayers, when he described the thick darkness covering everything, the deep gloom enshrouding all the peoples. Thick darkness and deep gloom — we don’t need long, fancy sentences to describe our sorrowful terrain, do we? It’s obvious when people try to speak of something they don’t know firsthand, but Isaiah knows this bitter place. I guess I do too.

I was waterworks through most of the liturgy. I kept adjusting my glasses, rubbing my eyes like I was fishing for some stray irritant. A few times, my voice cracked and faded out mid-song or litany. It’s remarkable how humans across geography and history and ethnicity and circumstance have known this gloom, this despair. A plea for God to act, to break through the rubble. To Advent.…