Anguish has taken wing, dispelled is darkness: The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. — Isaiah 8:23a, 9:2
I saw a great light tonight. As I drove down College Avenue, I looked up to find the sky aflame. It literally took my breath away. On this last day of classes, the fiery rose and gold sunset seemed to say, here, here is Advent. A season of lights set out in a world yet dimmed with tragedy, grief and sin. Stop. Look. Listen.
Four years ago, in the depths of winter, I spent thirty days in silence in a retreat house on the edge of the Atlantic ocean making the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. It was an extraordinary experience of prayer, awash in fire and water, tinged with the light of dawn and sharpened on the edge of frigid winter nights. These exercises are made in silence, save for Mass and a daily conversation with the Jesuit directing my retreat, but once a day I would take my iPod and sit in the sun in the small alcove under the stairs, and set one of my assigned periods of meditations adrift in a sea of music.
The second week of St. Ignatius’ Exercises begins with meditating on the Incarnation and so it will perhaps come as no surprise that my playlist included an exquisite Ave Maria, but the piece that can still pull me back into those depths of prayer is Stella Maris….
Solve vincla reis, profer lumen caecis…the clear soprano voices called.
Loosen the chains of the guilty, send forth light to the blind.
These threads of the prophet Isaiah, warp to the Gospel’s weft, holding it within its place in salvation history, bind me to the whole company of Israel as I pray.
Anguish has taken wing, dispelled is darkness: The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.
The word caecis in Latin means more than physically sightless, it can mean aimless or confused. Isaiah promises not just that our blindness (metaphorical or otherwise) will be healed but that the anguish of our confusions will be eased, our wanderings given direction.....
There is much tangled in my life these days, and I long for some easing of the confusion, for some clear direction in these muddled times. Anguish has taken wing, dispelled is darkness: The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.
As one of my Jesuit friends reminds me: first, we preach to ourselves.
O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae: veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.
O Dawn, splendor of eternal light, and sun of justice, come, and shine on those seated in darkness, and in the shadow of death.
As one of my Jesuit friends reminds me: first, we preach to ourselves.
O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae: veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.
O Dawn, splendor of eternal light, and sun of justice, come, and shine on those seated in darkness, and in the shadow of death.
I too find that so much is muddled in my life at the moment and it is strangely comforting to learn that you too get muddled and long for light. I have returned over and over to this post and been warmed and heartened by your words.
ReplyDeleteThank you for shining a light in my darkness this Advent.