The Fourth Light: The Frightful Adventure of Love

It is a curious thing that we light our final Advent candle for love. Curious because love seems, at first glance, to be exactly what we have been running away from in all our modern Christmas preparations. We have replaced love with efficiency, substituted management for mystery, and somehow convinced ourselves that the best way to prepare for the coming of Love Himself is to make ourselves too busy to notice any love at all.

The modern world (which has performed the remarkable feat of making even love boring) thinks of love as something soft and safe, like a comfortable chair or a warm bath. But the love we speak of in this final week of Advent is nothing of the sort. It is more like a sword or a flame - something dangerous and transforming and altogether too alive to be entirely safe. We might say that the difference between modern love and Advent love is the difference between a picture of a fire and a real one: one will warm your house, but the other might burn it down.

Consider how this final candle comes to us. We do not light it because we have achieved love, or because we have made ourselves lovable, or even because we have learned to love properly. We light it because Love is coming, ready or not, invited or uninvited, prepared for or not. It is rather like lighting a signal fire for an incoming army - an army that fights for us, true enough, but one that will demand everything from us all the same.

And here we stumble upon the great paradox of Advent love, which is that it is both the thing we most desperately want and the thing we are most desperately afraid of. For the love that comes at Christmas is not the love we would have invented. It does not keep its distance or mind its manners. It does not respect our personal space or our carefully constructed defenses. It insists, with divine rudeness, on getting born in the middle of our messy lives.

This explains, perhaps, why we are so busy at Christmas. We are like people cleaning frantically before the arrival of a guest who intends not just to visit our home but to renovate it entirely. We sense, somehow, that the love coming towards us is not content merely to comfort us but insists on transforming us, and transformation is always a dangerous business.

The ancient prophets understood this better than we do. When they spoke of the coming of divine love, they used images not of comfort but of catastrophe - mountains melting like wax, hills skipping like lambs, the earth itself shaking at the presence of the Lord. They knew that the love we await in Advent is not the sort that fits comfortably into our lives but the sort that demands our whole lives as a response.

This is why the Church, in her peculiar wisdom, places the candle of love last in our Advent wreath. She knows that we could not bear to face this love until we have been prepared by hope, peace, and joy. For this is not the safe, domesticated love we have made of it, but the wild, pursuing, relentless love that burns at the heart of Christmas itself - the love that drove God himself to become a baby, infinity to become finite, the Word to become wordless.

And here we arrive at the magnificent joke of Christmas, which is that this overwhelming, all-demanding divine love arrives not with the thunder of armies but with the cry of a newborn. The fire that could consume the universe confines itself to warming a stable. The love that could melt mountains chooses instead to melt human hearts, and does so not through power but through vulnerability.

As we light this fourth candle, we are doing something far more dangerous than we usually imagine. We are not simply celebrating love as a nice idea or a warm feeling. We are signaling our willingness (or at least our willingness to be willing) to be changed by love, to be wounded by love, to be undone and remade by love. We are, in other words, preparing for Christmas.

For the love that comes at Christmas is not content merely to be admired from a distance. It demands to be born in us, just as it was born in Mary. It insists on taking flesh again, on making our ordinary lives into mangers where the divine might be cradled. It requires us to become, like Joseph, protectors of a mystery larger than ourselves.

And if this seems too much to ask - well, that is precisely why we needed Advent. These four weeks of waiting and watching, of lighting candles in the darkness, have been preparing us for exactly this moment. Hope has taught us to look beyond what seems possible. Peace has shown us that our chaos cannot overcome God's order. Joy has revealed to us that the end of the story is better than we dared to dream. And now love comes to begin that story again, in us.

So we light our final candle, not because we are ready, but because Love will not wait for our readiness. We light it because Christmas is coming, ready or not, and with it comes love that will either be welcomed as a guest or arrive as an intruder, but will arrive all the same. We light it because love, real love, divine love, is always an advent - always a coming, always an arrival, always something that happens to us rather than something we achieve.

And in the end, that is our greatest comfort. For it means that Christmas does not depend on our preparations but on God's promise, not on our worthiness but on His love. The candle we light today is not a signal of our readiness but a sign of our surrender to a love that will transform us whether we are ready or not.

-The Seeker's Quill