The seven practices of the Way of Love interconnect often. When it comes to the practice Go, we often add words. Go and preach. Go and serve. Go and listen. Go and worship. Go and pray. In our walks of faith following Jesus, we must find the courage to go beyond our comfortable communities and companions into unknown places and spaces. Doing that work takes practice; I don’t know many people who thrive when thrust continuously into unfamiliar situations.
As we go down the road to Bethlehem with Mary this Advent season, what looks and sounds different? What do you see and hear that is the same as you remember? Many of us have had to change how we go in our daily lives. Many of us don’t do much going at all. For some of us, we are on a spiritual journey, or as author and social justice advocate Dr. Catherine Meeks calls it, a journey to the heart. As we go within, we encounter darkness and light, lightness and dark, just as Mary and Jesus do as her time to deliver draws nearer.
What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light. Lightness and darkness elicit positive and negative characteristics. In our society, we can attach singular definitions to one or the other, such as the extremely simplistic approach of light is good and dark is bad. We’ve all seen how that narrow thinking plays out, and we can go deeper. A baby thrives in the darkness of its mother’s womb; in darkness, it receives everything that it needs. We grow and thrive in the dark, like seeds sown into good earth.
In my heart’s journey this Advent, I’m crossing the boundary that says light and dark is black and white. When God chose to bring the light of the world to the earth on a night in Bethlehem from Mary’s womb, God makes it clear that dark and light cannot exist without each other. Too much of one and not enough of the other withers and destroys. Going deeper into our hearts might find us needing to shine a light on unseen and unknown recesses. We can only do this after we take some time to adjust our vision to the dark to see what our heart has hidden so that when the lights come on and temporarily blind us, we remember where to look.
My heart journey this Advent finds me seeking a baby born into darkness who brings us great light and life. Baby Jesus will soon be here for all of us to hold and love—some of us in the hush of night as he fusses and cries, and some of us in the bustle of the day when he sleeps. And we will bind him to us to go and share this good news.