St. Lucy Day

St. Lucy December 13

“Santa Lucia, thy light is glowing

Through darkest winter night, comfort bestowing.

Dreams float on dreams tonight,

Comes then the morning light,

Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia.” Swedish Children’s Folk Song

Already today this December 13 in the darkest hours of the morning (2 a.m. to 4 a.m.), in Sweden and Norway the eldest daughter of a family wearing a white gown, a red sash and a crown of lingonberry twigs and seven blazing candles on her head emerges out of the darkness carrying a tray of rich saffron buns and steaming coffee to wake up her family. Every village also has its own Lucy who goes from one farm to the next carrying a torch to light her way, bringing cookies and buns at each house and returning home by day break. The winner of the Nobel peace prize for literature often has the honor of lighting the candles on the head of the Lucy for the city of Stockholm.

Throughout Sweden the feast day of Lucy, is celebrated as a festival of lights with bonfires with incense and candlelight parades. How in the world did this honoring of St. Lucy become so important in Scandinavia when Lucy was a native of Sicily? The tradition of honoring Lucy may have originated in Sweden with Vikings who traveled south on peaceful trading expeditions to Italy and brought back the stories of the early Christian martyr, Lucia.

December 13 presently is almost the shortest day of the year. Somehow the Scandinavians began to honor a young Sicilian girl, Lucy, whose name means “light” at a time during the darkest part of their year. It is all a mystery but the tradition is beautiful.

I especially honor this day because two friends who carried the light of Christ to so many people died on this day seven years apart. Another light bearer who was our great teacher and friend was initially to have major heart surgery today. So, in my own prayers on St. Lucy Day, I remember special friends who have brought light out of darkness to so many, but remembering especially those in my own life who showed me the light in times of darkness.

This is my Advent thought for you to remember today on St. Lucy Day those who brought the light of Christ, the light of God, the light of the Spirit to you.

This is a special tradition that the Scandinavians have given us to remember the light that shines in our darkness. We can also take the tradition to our homes. In the past, our family has often celebrated St. Lucy Day during the second week of Advent with our oldest granddaughter serving buns at an Advent family service. She dresses in white with a red sash and carries a candle as we all say the traditional song above that Lucy sings on her rounds.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Buechner: Counter Culture

Buechner: Counter Culture

“To pray for your enemies, to worry about the poor when you have worries enough of your own, to start becoming yourself fully by giving of yourself prodigally to whoever needs you, to love your neighbors when an intelligent 4th grader could tell you that the way to get ahead in the world is to beat your neighbors to the draw every chance you get—that was what this God asked, Paul wrote.” Frederick Buechner, Quote of the Day, first published in The Clown in the Belfry.

phtography by Joanna ES Campbell

Buechner reminds us how countercultural the Christian faith was from the get go as well as today. There is no better time to experience this than in the season of Advent in the church year. It is the four weeks before Christmas at the beginning of the church year. While during December our culture is hurrying, overloaded, frantic, caught up in a commercial craziness, the season of Advent calls us to a quiet preparedness, watching, waiting, pausing. In fact, the staff at our church has made “pause, breathe, wait, watching for the Christ child” as our theme for the season. “Pause, Breathe, Wait, Watching for the Christ Child.”

Advent is my favorite season, and this call to quietness makes it even more so. We put on pause the cacophony inside and outside of our heads, sit in a favorite chair, look or walk outside, light candles, feel something moving inside of our body as we move from our head to our body and become grounded to the present moment.

The air we breathe in and out is full of the anticipation of new birth in us and the world. The Christ child who is already within us wakes up and opens its eyes and smiles as the Christ within us sees the light of Christ across the room in someone we want to know better who seems quite different from us.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Anders: Tree of LIfe

Anders: The Tree of Life

Guest Writer: Isabel Anders

“The tree of life, in God’s plan, is more than a figure of speech. It is a description of the physical branching out of families, one way through which God’s Word and his ways may be passed on. In this context, parenthood is both the most natural of callings and the most humbling privilege. It is important to remember how much God cares about physical life. For all my abstract thinking about images and ideas, my greatest task at the moment is to eat and drink properly to become a fit branch for the flowering of a new life. “It is not the spiritual which is first but the physical, and then the spiritual,” Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 15:46. Isabel Anders, Awaiting the Child (Cowley, 1987, 2005).

As the foreshadowing of Jesus’ conception began with the first woman, and the promise was brought to fruition in Mary, so that tree, built through generations, out of the root of Jesse, is truly a Tree of Life, nurtured in the most human manner. Earthly lives and deaths are its tenuous branches, faithfulness and weakness are woven into its life, and God calls blessed those who choose to “abide” in him in order to bear the necessary fruit.

Human life, it seems, is never irrelevant to God’s plan. Instead, we are in the thick of it. We can enter into this design, this story, by accepting the joys and pains of our humanity and submitting them to the good of the kingdom. We can rejoice that participation in its growth is allowed, and cooperate by choosing those things that build and sustain life for our families, our communities, our world. As Moses urged his people Israel in the crucial early stages of the tree’s growth: “Therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live” (Deut. 30: 19).

The tree has been a symbol of life from the very beginning. But we cannot forget that in the sweep of the continuing story, life and death converged on a tree—the cross of wood that both took Christ’s earthly life and won our redemption into ongoing life. As the seed for the tree begins as a very small entity, yet carries in it all the potential for the flowering of the whole tree, so Advent carries in it the seed of the whole drama of our salvation. The planting, the watering, the tending can be conscious acts in our lives, as we wait for God to give the increase, to bring about his purposes in the world and in our lives—in this place, in this hour.

Isabel Anders, author of Awaiting the Child: An Advent Journal (Cowley, 1987, 2005). Managing Editor, Synthesis Publications, Synthesispub.com