Fourth Tuesday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
Open to Light
Art piece by the author, Erin Wildsmith
Sometimes the most profound truths come to us from humble teachers. A few years ago, after a particularly difficult day at work, I bought myself a small potted plant as a pick-me-up (I know, I know - emotional spending, but never mind that now).
What made the day difficult was a conversation at the end of it with a person who seemed to have lost, not only hope but even the belief in or desire for hope. Of course I know that circumstances, hardship and mental illness all do this kind of thing to us. Many of us have had those moments the ancient teachers call “the dark night of the soul.” And as a pastor, I’ve certainly walked through these moments with people before. But this seemed different.
There was something about the flatness in this person’s voice or the deadness in their eyes that day that caught me off guard. Like when you walk by the home of a friend you haven’t seen in a long time, and find the windows boarded and the property overgrown. I found myself unprepared.
The conversation that day felt like death, and left me hungry for life: hence the houseplant.
Like most $6 grocery store plants, I expected the poor little thing to wilt after a week or two, but surprisingly, it didn’t. I kept watering it, and somehow it kept living. Sooner or later it felt like I should move it from our dark dining room to a window for a bit of natural light. That’s when I noticed.
Turns out my little impulse purchase had a surprising ability: it opened to light. The interesting triangular leaves and occasional delicate white flowers always, always, opened wide with the sunrise and closed tight at night. Every time. My oxalis plant (because of course I had to google it!) wasn’t picky about the kind of day it was outside the window where I placed it. Cold and grey or bright and sunny. Every day, without fail, my tiny little plant always stretched itself wide to receive all that was being offered. And there was something in this small, humble fact that moved me.
If I were to give this plant a name, I think it would have to be Hannah (I’ve been known to christen plants before). Hannah after the woman we meet in 1 Samuel 1. One of the wives of Elkanah and the one who would become the mother of the great prophet Samuel.
At the time in the text when we meet Hannah, though, she’s nobody’s mother. And to a woman in the Ancient Near East, finding oneself “nobody’s mother” was, if possible, even more gut-wrenchingly sad than it is for would-be parents facing infertility today. It was salt in a wound, unbearable shame mixed with intolerable heartache. And it was understood to be singularly the woman’s fault, every time.
To make matters worse, Hannah is not the only wife of her husband Elkanah. She and Penanniah share one husband, and the other woman has borne him many sons and daughters.
Hannah was thought to be “barren.” And “barren” must have been the word that echoed around her brain on many a sleepless night as Penanniah, provoked her mercilessly. Like a six-dollar grocery store plant, Hannah would have had every right to close herself up like a boarded up house. But surprisingly, she makes a different choice. Hannah choses to open to light.
Because the Lord had closed Hannah’s womb, her rival kept provoking her in order to irritate her. This went on year after year. Whenever Hannah went up to the house of the Lord, her rival provoked her till she wept and would not eat. Her husband Elkanah would say to her, “Hannah, why are you weeping? Why don’t you eat? Why are you downhearted? Don’t I mean more to you than ten sons?”
Once when they had finished eating and drinking in Shiloh, Hannah stood up. Now Eli the priest was sitting on his chair by the doorpost of the Lord’s house. In her deep anguish Hannah prayed to the Lord, weeping bitterly.
1 Samuel 1:6-10
Make no mistake. When we find Hannah pouring out her soul in tears and wordless prayers to the Lord shortly before our Lectionary reading begins, that is exactly what she was doing. Like all of us facing a dark night of the soul, I’m sure Hannah was tempted to choose a flat, dead life, trampling the tender shoots of grief before they had a chance to grow up into hope, but she didn't do that.
The tears and grief Hannah poured out at the temple that day, rather than the dying breath of despair, were actually a defiant testimony to hope. For whenever we lament deeply and wholeheartedly as Hannah did, we declare that the life we are living is not life as it is meant to be. We express our faith that there is more, and our grief becomes the inarticulate longing for the more we believe in but cannot yet see or touch.. Indeed it is as 20th century theologian Jurgen Moltmann so succinctly puts it in Theology of Hope,
“If we had before our eyes only what we see, then we should cheerfully or reluctantly reconcile ourselves with things as they happen to be. That we do not reconcile ourselves, that there is no pleasant harmony between us and reality is due to our unquenchable hope.”
It is the unquenchable hope of Hannah, the stubborn almost defiant way my oxalis plant always opens to light that is at the heart of Advent. If Christmas is “comfort and joy,” then Advent is disruption, discomfort and longing, but not without purpose. Advent is our opportunity to weep bitterly like Hannah, boldly daring to proclaim all that is not right in our world and in so doing, stoking the fires “unquenchable hope” that there is something (Someone) better, something (Someone) more.
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