The photo above shows Advent wreath candles, and we light the pink candle today. While purple represents a more somber sense of purification, pink is jubilant and confident. Read Tessa’s lovely introduction to the wreath here.

During Advent, while many celebrate Christmas before Christmas, Tessa and I try to slow down and quiet down. I hope you can try it, too. In the morning darkness, I light the little Advent wreath that sits on a table my parents had when I was a toddler. I sit on a cushion and gaze on a New Mexican crucifix and an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe above the candles. I sing a verse of “O Come Emmanuel.”

For years I have loved the antiphon from Advent Morning Prayer:

Your light will come, Jerusalem;
the Lord will dawn on you in radiant beauty.
You will see God’s glory within you.

Radiance and glory in the silent darkness. Starlight and beauty.

Remember: on December 17, we begin praying the O Antiphons. Tessa has a beautiful introduction to them here. And here you’ll find her creative daily prayers based on the traditional antiphons. May these reflections enrich your prayer in the final week before Christmas.

Our final Fire and Light podcast, “Christmas Joy and Gladness,” is now available here. We’ve loved recording these conversations for the past two years, and we’re grateful to all of you who have listened, and especially to you who have responded. In this final conversation, we draw inspiration from Season of Glad Songs, our Christmas anthology. And we focus on the Feast of the Epiphany, the Twelfth Day of Christmas.

Commercialized Christmas, separated from the story of a vulnerable child born in occupied territory in a violent empire, eclipses the deeper mystery of Incarnation. You may find it easier to focus on the mystical depths at Epiphany. Latch onto the star and linger in Bethlehem as the empire goes back to business. I hope our podcast and Season of Glad Songs may help you do just that.

As the Winter Solstice approaches, I recall winters past. It is nearly five years since I moved from Colorado to Arizona. I love long winter nights, whether in the wilderness of Colorado’s San Luis Valley, or here in the Sonoran Desert. But what a contrast! Advent in Crestone, Colorado meant big stacks of firewood and the evening ritual of starting or reviving a fire in the wood stove. The crackling stove, the smell of piñon and juniper smoke, were constant winter companions. Stars were brilliant. Silence was a thick blanket. Snow fell invisibly. And the water pipes only froze once!

Here in the desert winter, I have a new ritual: at night I set up my camping cot on my porch, throw down a sleeping bag, and slumber beneath the few stars visible in our light-polluted neighborhood. And I “wait in joyful hope” for the sound of coyotes above the traffic hum, or for the rooster crow before dawn from a neighbor’s yard.

Ever since returning from a summer in Afghanistan as an exchange student, I struggle to sleep indoors in the desert summer. It’s too hot to sleep outdoors and an air-conditioned suburban house or apartment cuts me off from the natural world. Long days rob me of cool darkness. I wake up to a racing heart and high anxiety. The midnight devil. It feels like incarceration: creepy, not cozy. I wrestle with mortality, loss. Everything will go wrong. I am faulty, isolated. But, as the psalmist writes, “joy comes with dawn” (Psalm 30:6). And with winter, too.

I never recovered from the slow life of Kabul, with its sounds of roosters, donkeys, and the occasional camel. So I rise before dawn, lean out the balcony wall to confirm Orion’s location in the sky, and silently greet the rooster. Then I’m ready to come inside and light the Advent wreath.

Summer’s withering anxiety flees. In these final days of Advent, dread yields to a calming glimpse of candlelight that brightens within, around, and above me.

Soon the dawn from on high breaks on me, on us, in radiant beauty.