Advent 2025 : day two

 

Warning: mention of suicide

The Advent candles are not the only candles we light in our home throughout Advent. We also light a frankincense & myrrh candle. One of the smells of Advent, along with cinnamon biscuits—for smell connects deeply with memory and so has a key role in keeping traditions alive—is frankincense & myrrh. Two of the three gifts (along with gold) presented to the infant Jesus and his parents by the magi/wisemen/kings.

This is a dark time of year. The sun does not rise above the horizon, here where I live, until 8.00 a.m. (by mid-December, not until 8.15 a.m.) and sets mid-afternoon.

These are dark times, at the best of times. Not a week goes by without news of another life taken in violence by its own hand. Lives that have run dry of hope, carrying a burden of pain they just don’t think they can continue to bear. Tragically, often longing to be reunited with family members who have died too soon, carried away by illness or accident or suicide.

For some, this darkness, this void of despair, is evidence against the existence—or at least the efficacy—of God, of a god who is good and loving and strong. And yet, for others, it is in the darkness that Light and Love shine most brightly. How, then, might we side with the Light and Love?

Those gifts—made to a child who all too soon will find himself a refugee, his peers butchered by hardened soldiers at the orders of a fragile king—just might hold a clue, a key. Incense, symbol of prayer rising; prayers rising, even when we can find no words. And myrrh, used to prepare a body for burial, a final act of tenderness, of kindness, of dignity; and though these days embalming is undertaken by professionals, we still might embrace the bereaved with tender touch.

In the darkness, we light a frankincense & myrrh candle, and breath in what it means to wait, until our eyes adjust, until the clouds pass over and the stars are revealed, fierce pinpoints of light in blazing glory.