The Weary World Rejoices?
In a time of chronic lethargy and mass tragedy: joy still percolating through.
I am sick, as are many. My thoughts are thin and cloudy, like feeling the world’s corporate lethargy and tragedy inside of my neural pathways. Many feel the same, with the physical weighing down of a seasonal flu coming almost as a relief: a poetic feeling from the last few years made concrete. We are beings created for eternal lightness, made heavy by time and its fallen-world effects.
But there is an undeniable peace and joy percolating through the hard, fine grains of my head and heart and aching body, with steady pressure and a persistent coming forth. Eternity always seeps in through muddy earth; the Incarnation inflames all of heavy mortality with an eternal vision; Christ lives, suffers, and sanctifies all—even before the Cross, by His very existence: the marrying of earth and Heaven, of matter and spirit, of God with the dust of humanity.
God came in the night, in the cold, in the hidden, messy dark—and it will always be so, until the end of time. We should not fret, not fundamentally, at least. God is coming. Emmanuel.
This is what we anticipate as we walk the final week to Christmas. But we have to stay little, have to stoop and slow down to see.
Here is one of the tracks from the Advent demo album, which you can still download here. A small glint of light in a world of so much darkness, like so much of what we do in this life, but given with the confidence of the heavenly courts streaming down through it, should God allow, participating in the Light that shone forth from a humble stable or cave in Bethlehem so many years ago.