Father Tom McKenna offers this final Advent reflection – Mary and Darkness

There’s a verse somewhere in the Advent readings which sets a tone for much of the season. “Over you shall come a great darkness.”

If you heard that line standing by itself and out of the Bible’s context, you might hear it as anything but comforting. The “great darkness” – conjuring up images and feelings of foreboding, childhood terrors and plain old fear of the dark.

But as we sensed through the four weeks, the darkness of Advent is of another kind, a night time with another feel to it. Its scenes and pictures and words capture a darkness that’s bringing some wondrous light, a coldness holding within it a kind of warmth. Advent-dark is that luminous kind of darkness that gathers itself just before the dawn.

You can hear it in the season’s music with its held-back notes and far off harmonies, somehow off in the distance and yet close at the same time. You can see it in the colors, purple, but not quite purple. There’s a little hint of light in back of Advent purple. You might say it speaks of being in that darkness, but not of being alone there. Something very good lives in that dark and is about to break through it.

A poem by Jessica Powers catches the mood. She meditates on the kind of darkness you’d find “inside Mary’s womb.”

Advent

I live my Advent in the womb of Mary.

And on one night when a great star swings free

from its high mooring and walks down the sky

to be the dot above the Christus i,

I shall be born of her by blessed grace.

I wait in Mary-darkness, faith’s walled place,

with hope’s expectance of nativity.

I knew for long she carried and fed me,

guarded and loved me, though I could not see.

But only now, with inward jubilee,

I come upon earth’s most amazing knowledge:

Someone is hidden in this dark with me. 

Advent Darkness — the bountiful, pregnant, promising kind. Mary-darkness — “faith’s walled place, coming upon this most amazing knowledge. Someone is hidden in this dark with me!”

With her and all disciples, we pray: Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus