The holiday season is awash in light. Cities and neighborhoods, businesses and homes are festooned with a brightness that, at least for these few weeks, pushes back the longer nights, punching holes in the darkness.

For people of Christian faith, the season of Advent began Sunday, December 3rd with the lighting of the first candle in the Advent wreath. These four Sundays before Christmas are a time of reflective repentance and hopeful expectation awaiting the birth of Jesus Christ. Christians mark the season of Advent with light and music and worship both private and public.

Our Jewish colleagues, clients, and friends are in the midst of celebrating Hanukkah. Starting the evening of this past December 7th, the first of 8 candles was lit in menorahs throughout the world, celebrating freedom and hope. Some 200 years before the birth of Jesus, Jews were denied the freedom to practice their religion by an occupying country, Eventually, Jewish freedom fighters successfully reclaimed both their Temple and the practice of their faith. This story is one of many in human history that honor the unfettered human spirit!

Many of our African American friends and clients will celebrate Kwanzaa later this month. An African harvest celebration that will run from December 26th through the 31st, Kwanzaa has its origins in the southern hemisphere celebrating the first fruits of the harvest. Like Advent and Hanukkah, candles are lit, families gather, and joy is the defining spirit of these days.

Our world, perhaps now more than in my 70 years of memory, seems enveloped in unrelenting darkness. The war between Israel and Hamas, the continued political division in our country, the threats to freedom and democracy posed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the dis-ease most of us feel about the future taunts and haunts us. The temptation is to give in to these threats, to become cynical, to sit down in the darkness and weep.

The faiths and spirit of Advent, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa are lifting up another story. Those stories may be best summarized by a line from the first verses in the Gospel of John of the Christian scriptures. “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness did not comprehend it.” I like another translation even better: “The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness; the darkness couldn’t put it out.”

Whether or not you are a person with a faith practice, here is a clarion call to be for ourselves, our families, and our clients a person of light and life, of hope and promise. More so now that perhaps ever in recent memory, these holiday weeks can be for us, those we serve, and those we love, a season of light that the darkness cannot put out!