"Better to light a candle," the saying goes, "than to curse the darkness." The symbol of the lighting of the Advent candles is just to this important and immensely wise point. As the winter nights grow longer and longer, we light more and more candles rather than curse the fact that the days are shorter and nights deeper and darker.

And yet lighting candles rather than cursing the darkness is not a universal practice, is it? Too many of us are frozen in a darkness in which the lights around us are so dim as to be almost unnoticeable. And we make our adjustments to a sad state of affairs.

Woody Allen tells the story of a man who goes to a psychiatrist and complains that his brother thinks he's a chicken. "He makes all kinds of chicken noises and walks around the house in a crouched over position with his arms folded like wings. It's real embarrassing," the man says.

The psychiatrist says, "It sounds to me like your brother is not psychotic by any measure, he simply has a neurosis and if you bring him in I am quite sure that I can treat him successfully.

To which the man replies, "O, we don't want you to do that."

"Why not, " the psychiatrist replies.

"Because we need the eggs."

There are times when we have become too well adjusted to bad situation. To embrace the little bits of light around us is sometimes harder than to cave in to the oppressive and suffocating weight of darkness. And after all, as the man in the Woody Allen story says, "We need the eggs." It's not that we curse the darkness entirely. We just adjust to it as best we are able.

Advent is the season of Holy Expectations. A season in which we expect the impossible to happen in our lives, knowing full well that when even the most joyful thing happens, it may mean that we might have to give up some of our eggs. Advent is the season in which the Gospel proclaims with a growing urgency, that our world with all its slings and arrows need not be that way at all. Advent is the season in which a candle is lighted, one more each week, as a sign that we fully expect the light of God's love to shine even in our darkness, in this, the darkest season of the year.

This ability to rejoice, to give thanks, to count blessings has to be one of the true secrets of the good and blessed life.

The story is told of a man who was lost in a storm at sea. He had been thrown overboard and was floundering in the crashing waves. But he was a pious man and he knew that his God would come to rescue him. Along came a small boat in the storm and the pilot of the boat called out to the man and the man called back that he didn't need any help because he knew that his God could come to him and rescue him soon.

Days went by. The man was now holding onto a piece of board. Another ship came by and threw a rope and lifesaver out to the man, but the man refused it saying that his God would soon rescue him.

Another day went by and yet another vessel with a would be rescuer came to offer help and this offer of rescue was rejected.

Finally the man died and went to heaven where he was met by God. The man was furious with God for not rescuing him and said so. To which God responded, "What's the problem? I sent you three boats!"

Was it really better for this man to die waiting for a miracle than to accept God's miraculous help sent in human form? He is like the one who thinks it is better to accept the darkness and curse it, than to light one candle.

Advent is a season of hope in which we believe that God works in sometimes subtle and almost unnoticeable ways to achieve salvation. Mundane and almost hidden things are the tools God uses to achieve holiness, healing and glorification for us.

The questions put to Jesus in today's reading from the Gospel of Luke is, "When and with what signs will our God come to us and free us from all oppression?" And Jesus' answer is not particularly comforting. He says, "There will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and upon the earth distress of nations in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, the peoples fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world; for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Heaven coming in a cloud with power and great glory." Sounds . like a promise of more darkness than light.

What I hear in those images is that God comes in times of crisis; in all times of crisis. God is most often present when it is most dark. When our lives are most in their season of frost. God is most present when the wind and the sea have us utterly terrified. God is most present and the Messiah is most at hand when life has us most beaten and hopeless. For it is then to light the candle of expectation, the candle of hope. Or perhaps simply to notice the candles that other gentle and stubborn souls may have lit and other boats sent by way of our salvation.

Lighting the candle of hope in the bright daylight is just a little ridiculous. Lighting this candle in the very midst of the darkness, in the very midst of the darkest season of the year in this hemisphere, is to make a sign of God's presence even in the most hopeless of times and places.

When the people are trembling with fear and foreboding; when nations are in distress; when the sea is roaring and waves threatening; it is then that we should look for our salvation. It is then that we should light a candle or pay attention to the candles that have been lit. For the act of lighting the candle is an extraordinary act of faith, is it not? Just one candle against the onslaught of so much darkness is just a little bit ridiculous.

William Styron is a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist. He wrote, among many other novels, The Confessions of Nat Turner. He has also written an absolutely riveting book about a suicidal depression that gripped him at about age 60. In a particularly difficult passage he describes a night in which he had decided to end all the suffering that comes with clinical depression. His wife was asleep upstairs in the bed. The furnace of their home had quit working. He was downstairs sitting before the television set watching an old movie trying to muster the energy to destroy his life.

At one point in the film he was watching, the characters were walking down the hallway of a music conservatory and from beyond the walls of that hallway came a contralto voice, and "a sudden soaring passage from the Brahms Alto Rhapsody."

This sound, which like all music--indeed, like all pleasure--I had been numbly unresponsive to for months, pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys the house had known: the children who had rushed through its rooms, the festivals, the love and work, the honestly earned slumber, the voices and the nimble commotion, the perennial tribe of cats and dogs and birds, . . . All this I realized was more than I could ever abandon, even as what I had set out so deliberately to do was more than I could inflict on those memories and upon those, so close to me, with whom the memories were bound. And just a powerfully I realized I could not commit this desecration upon myself. I drew upon some last gleam of sanity to perceive the terrifying dimensions of the mortal predicament I had fallen into. I woke up my wife and soon telephone calls were made.⁽¹⁾

I have always been amazed at the movement of this season. We light this one candle then another, then another, then another. On Christmas Eve we will gather in this place or another place and we all will light candles starting on the outside aisles and gradually into the center until the place is full of light on the night of greatest darkness.

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

The lighting of the candles, the advent candles and the candles of Christmas Eve, is an act of a radical and stubborn hopefulness. It is fraught with danger. Not only because we could set the place on fire, but also in times of great danger we could call attention to ourselves. Our enemies might find us if we light a candle in the dark.

To light a candle is to stand firm against the power of darkness and to proclaim in the midst of darkness the coming of the messiah.

Lighting candles in darkness, in the deepest midnight hour of our souls, is to proclaim that the powers of darkness have no dominion over us and that God's dominion of justice and healing and love is on its way.

Light one candle -- or failing your ability to light a candle, at least be open to the light coming from candles that others have lit on your behalf.

1. Darkness Visible: a Memoir of Madness (Vintage, New York, 1992). Pp. 66-67.