John 1:6-8, 19-28
Halfway Out of the Dark
I love pink candle Sunday! So much so I forgot myself and wore my plane outfit to Mass today because it's pink. Oh well, life goes on.
As Father Rolo pointed out, the third candle on the Advent wreath is pink, which we light in remembrance that we are halfway through the season - halfway through the wait and preparation.
It reminds me of an introduction to a Christmas novel (okay, Christmas-ish novel, it's a Discworld novel) that says that there is always, in every religion, a mid-winter celebration. That it's meant many things throughout the religions, but there's a moment when we turn to each other and congratulate each other on making it halfway through the dark.
Which doesn't fully work with Christmas considering it's a) just really starting to warm up, winter, b) it's much more straight joy to me, and c) it's more like realizing that the darkness has no power over us anymore, because the light came into our hearts.
But I can't shake the loveliness of the idea. Here we are, halfway through preparations, halfway to the celebration of the coming of the light, and we dress up the priests and advent candles in pink to congratulate ourselves. (Father Rolo actually did NOT wear pink.) Halfway through the preparations. Halfway through the wait.
We get a lot of rhetoric in Advent about how we should constantly be busy. With all the Christmas specials blaring that we should keep Christmas in our hearts all year around, I can't help thinking that it's Advent we're forgetting. But then I think: perhaps I'm just trying to make, figuratively, John the Baptist the Messiah. See, thought I'd forgotten the gospel, didn't ya? I always get around to it!
I said yesterday that Elijah has to come first. And I think that's true. Advent has to come first. The discipline and the renunciation of worldly things has to come before we go out and use them to do the best good we know how. We have to remember the strictness of our imperative, the necessity of our call, in order to keep it close in our hearts as we dance in the joy of the myriad proofs of God's love.
But One is coming, for whom even John is not worthy to tie His sandals. A time is coming that makes the work of Advent as to nothing. Our baptism with water will be renewed with fire and the Holy Spirit. And we are halfway there.
We are halfway out of the dark.
The whole world is about to change. That is the joy of Pink Candle Sunday - the joy both of what to come and of what we are gaining in the desert. The joy of now, and the promise of more to come.
Perhaps the best lives are lived on Pink Candle Sunday. Perhaps all the great saints resided there. You might think it would have been Christmas or Easter or Good Friday - but I wonder if it's Pink Candle Sunday that best describes the good life lived on earth. Or perhaps only the saints who took Holy Orders.
The religious life is wedding the joy of the desert to the joy of the promise of what's to come. The religious life is Pink Candle Sunday. The spiritual joy, pure and uncomplicated by all the other trappings of Christmas. And those who choose to build families live in Christmas. The difference between John in the desert and Jesus eating and drinking with tax collectors.
But whether we choose to make it our life or not, we all need the moment to remember: we are halfway out of the dark. The Light is coming.
We must be ready.
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