Advent 1: Lit from within

My morning generally starts with tea, the warmth of the cup in my hand as welcome as the jolt of caffeine my dark and bitter Assam provides.  My tea kettle is a glass flask, and in these dim days I've noticed that when the water reaches the boil, the flask suddenly seems to glow.  It's just physics, refraction, the way light changes direction when it hits the interface between two phases (gas and liquid in this case).  Instead of the smooth almost planar interface at the surface of the water, suddenly I have non-planar interfaces all over the place, bending light in many directions, themselves moving, spreading the light out yet further.  Ergo, my flask seems lit from within.

Advent is by far my favorite liturgical season.  I have an Advent playlist on my computer, the readings from Isaiah and the minor prophets reach places deep within me.  I wish we could return to a longer Advent season.  But this year I've had a tough time shifting from Ordinary Time into this time of expectant waiting.  It may be that so many other pieces of my life are moving.  On sabbatical, I have few regular anchors to my daily rounds.  Write today. Visited a class for a colleague yesterday.  Oops, pack up tonight to leave on an early flight in the morning.  Does that mean doing laundry?  Or would what I did Tuesday after the last trip suffice?

I long for stillness in these days that are anything but.  Yet Advent is also a season of light, one that supposes that a single radiant dawn can illuminate the world, refracted again and again through prophets and preachers, through each of us.  We, too, are lit from within.