Here is my greeting for the season: May the Dark Nights of Advent prepare you and yours in becoming fertile soil for that tiny candlelight of Christmas that can become a fire upon the Earth.

We seldom celebrate Advent anymore. Only a few of us light some purple candles and remember that the four weeks before Christmas were traditionally dedicated to the theme of coming to terms with how shit, piss, puss, slime awful the world situation actually is.

So let us meditate on how many steps the Bush administration has taken toward pure fascism, how many useless wars are in process and being prepared for, and how stupid it is to let politicians who are dedicated to the oil industry and to rewarding military contractors choose for us how soon to get off the oil tit and stop attempting to control the treasure trove of the Middle East for the sake of being the most powerful empire on Earth.

Yes, and let us mediate on how shallow it is to suppose having things is more indicative of our happiness than being human. For the sake of having things a whole nation, many of them actually, encourages buying above all other virtues. Buying sustains the economy, a weirdly twisted economy that is effective in making the rich richer, the poor poorer, and the Earth devastated. At Halloween we begin fanning a religion of superficial buying cheer that wipes from our memory and our practice all trace of an Advent awareness.

Advent is always present. The obsolete structures of the world are always under judgment, in decay, and fast moving toward their dismal end. So is it too much to ask that we spend four weeks out of the year to face up to this grim truth?

Such a celebration does not make us pessimists. It only makes us realists. Purple is the color. Not a royal purple, but a dismal purple, a dark night of soul purple, a purple grief that human depravity has grown so great and become so thoroughly established in the power structures of the world.

Let us understand that these dark nights of realism are our friends. They prepare us to see the light, the true light, the light that Christmas was originally meant to celebrate. That tiny babe, and one bright star, that little light in a faraway place in the midst of a troubled confluence of social ills, that light still shines. We can see it when we allow the darkness to be dark enough, to be as dark as it is.

So what is the light? Surely some us are ready for, passionate for, some light shining in this darkness. The light is the dawn of our essential humanity, greatness, goodness, wholesome Trust of Reality, Joy of living, Love of all beings, Freedom to create the unprecedented futures we need. It may be that this light is a very small flicker in our actual human realization, but it is there, and it can grow into a fire that takes over our whole lives, and spreads to others, and burns away the evils of the world.

This light is also the dreadful fire of forgiveness for all our collusion with the nastiness of this lying, superficial, unconsciously destructive and genocidal darkness. This light is a new birth, a fresh start. We certainly need one. Every year. Yes, every day.

So, May the Dark Nights of Advent prepare you and yours in becoming fertile soil for that tiny candlelight of Christmas that can become a fire upon the Earth.

Gene Marshall
Advent 2007