The Hopes and Fears of All the Years: Day One
The Light Gets In
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
- Leonard Cohen, Anthem
Text: Isaiah 9:1-7
I’m sure you’ve noticed it, especially if you live in the Northern Hemisphere. The days are getting shorter and shorter. Daylight has been gradually shrinking since late June. The sun rises later and sets earlier. The evenings are longer and the shadows feel deeper somehow. It seems that the darkness might actually be winning, like the light may never return. And yet, this is exactly the season in which the hope of Isaiah 9 begins to shine.
I think Leonard Cohen’s lyrics beautifully capture the radical, transformational truth of the season of Advent. Our lives, our communities, and our systems are full of cracks—flaws, failures, injustices, and fractures. And yet, as the light that Advent promises begins to dawn, these same cracks become the very places through which the light can be seen.
In Isaiah 9, the prophet Isaiah is speaking to a people who are living under fear and oppression, led by kings like Ahaz, who capitulated to his fears and trusted the might of the empire rather than God’s promise to be with him. As a result of his failed leadership, his people were walking in darkness—political darkness, social darkness, spiritual darkness. Into this context comes Isaiah, speaking on behalf of God, and promising a light whose dawning will expose oppression, lift up the marginalized and oppressed, banish fear, and ultimately bend history toward justice.
This light doesn’t wait for the perfect moment to shine. It does not arrive in a world without cracks, after all. It comes in precisely through the cracks—in broken systems, in flawed leaders, in lives scarred by fear and injustice—none of those things can stop the light; the light still shines. This is actual good news, because it means that even our failures, any darkness that we create or is created for us, none of it can contain or extinguish the hope we are being invited to embrace for ourselves and for the world.
As the days grow shorter, let us remember that Advent is about looking for the light, even in unlikely places—in the ordinary and the imperfect—and letting it shine through us into the world around us.
Reflection:
Where do you see cracks in your life, your community, or the world?
How might God’s light still be seeping in, even when the darkness seems overwhelming?
This made me think of Brene Brown, whose work I adore & inhale at every opportunity…”Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light. “
She goes on to say the dark doesn’t destroy the light, it defines it.
This is profound & its product is hope. No matter how deep & dark things get, I cannot will myself to relinquish hope. It’s lingering there, waiting for our ignition.
The light is in all of us - In the small, kind & loving gesture from one human to another. It’s in the whisper of a parent to a child with empathy & grace; it’s in the listening heart of a stranger or the compassionate presence of a friend.