The First Light of Advent: The Sensible Madness of Hope

There is something magnificently absurd about lighting a single candle in December. It is, when you think about it properly, rather like bringing a butterfly to a battle or answering an earthquake with a whisper. Yet this is precisely what we do at Advent, and in doing so we stumble upon a truth so enormous that we might have tripped over it in broad daylight: hope is always unreasonable, and that is exactly why it is right.

The modern world, which prides itself on being reasonable, has concluded that hope is a sort of madness. And in this, as in many things, the modern world is precisely wrong in being precisely right. Hope is indeed a madness, but it is the sort of divine madness without which human beings cannot remain properly sane. The man who hopes when there is no reason to hope is not being unreasonable; he is acknowledging that reason itself has limits, like a map that shows its own edges.

Consider the first Advent candle, which we light when the days are shortest and the nights are longest. If we were being entirely reasonable about it, this would be exactly the wrong time to speak of hope. It would be like planting a garden in winter or singing at a funeral. Yet Christianity has always had this curious habit of doing exactly the wrong thing at exactly the right time. It plants joy in the soil of sorrow and raises songs in the house of mourning. It lights candles precisely when the darkness is deepest, not because it denies the darkness, but because it defies it.

The pagans, who were in many ways wiser than the modern materialists, understood this better than we do. They knew enough to celebrate the winter solstice not because it was the triumph of darkness, but because it was the turning point toward light. But Christianity goes further still. It does not merely celebrate the return of the light; it celebrates the light that never left, the light that "shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not."

This is why we begin Advent with hope, and why we symbolize it with a single flame. For hope, properly understood, is not the same as optimism. Optimism is the belief that everything will be fine, which is a pleasant enough fantasy until one looks at the morning newspaper. Hope is something altogether more robust and more ridiculous. It is the belief that everything has meaning, even when everything is not fine at all. It is the mad insistence that there is a plot to this story, even when we cannot see how the next chapter could possibly work out.

And here we arrive at the magnificent joke of Advent, which is that we are not actually waiting for something unknown. We are waiting for something that has already happened. The hope we proclaim is not the vague wish that things might get better, but the absolutely outrageous assertion that the best thing that could possibly happen has already happened, and that we have only to wait for its full unfolding.

This is why the Church, in her peculiar wisdom, begins her year not with the triumphant proclamation of Christ's birth, but with the quiet lighting of a single candle. It is a gesture so small as to be almost comic, like David facing Goliath with a slingshot or Moses confronting Pharaoh with a staff. Yet in this very smallness lies its power, for it reminds us that all the greatest things must start as the smallest things, and that hope itself began not with a revolution or an army, but with a young woman saying yes to an impossible proposition.

And so we light our first candle, performing an act that would seem to any sensible person to be perfectly futile. One small flame against all the darkness of the world? It is madness. But it is the same madness that believes a child could be God, that death could be defeated, that the world's story ends in joy. It is the madness of Christmas itself, which we prepare for in these dark December days. And if that is madness, then let us be mad, for in this holy season, the fools have found the wisdom that the wise have missed.

The first light of Advent speaks of hope, not because hope is easy, but because hope is essential. It is not the soft hope of optimism, but the hard hope of faith, the kind that continues to light candles even when the darkness shows no sign of understanding. It is the hope that dares to be ridiculous, and in daring, becomes sublime.

For in the end, what could be more hopeful than lighting a candle in the dark? It is an act that says, despite all evidence to the contrary, that light is stronger than darkness, that love is stronger than fear, and that whatever darkness we face, we do not face it alone. And that, after all, is what Advent is all about.

-The Seeker's Quill