First Sunday of Advent

For we are fallen like the trees, our peace

Broken, and so we must

Love where we cannot trust, and

Trust where we cannot know

And must await the wayward-coming grace

That joins both the living and the dead,

Taking us where we would not go–

Into the boundless dark.

When what was made has been unmade

The Maker comes to His work.

(Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1999)

There's something about the boundless dark of the Advent season. It's not a dark that will stay, "for the darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing" (TS Eliot). But it's not light yet.

And so we wait. Come, Lord Jesus.