A Season Of Luminous Shards

By Ken Woodley

There is a flickering melody in the depth of this COVID winter.
A fragment of singing light.
A small miracle that can make all the difference.
Pushing back against the pandemic darkness that tells us every day in quaking headlines that there is no God and that we are not—and could never, ever be—loved.
A luminous shard that seems to have fallen from somewhere among the stars.
Somewhere beyond the sky.
Somewhere beyond the most distant piece of the last thing that our eyes can see.
Coming from that which the darkness denies.
The darkness trying with all of its might to persuade us that the melody we have followed, the voice we hear singing in the wilderness, is a figment of our imagination.
But the song won’t be stilled or silenced.
Sometimes it even feels that the song has taken shelter inside of us, has become somehow a part of us.
But the song is not my own composition.
And the song is not yours.
Nevertheless, we both hear and feel it painting contours of light.
And now, look. Certainly, the flickering brightens as the music soars, as if our persistent steps have somehow fueled the light’s desperate reaching.
A desperate reaching out toward …
Can it be true?
A desperate reaching out toward us?
Toward us all?
Every race.
All people.
Without exception.
My, God! It is true!
Even so, astonishingly, there is still more.
There is something within the light, like one of those large sugar Easter eggs from my childhood. There was an entire landscape inside that you could see when you held the opening at one end up to your eye. I could never bring myself to eat it its sweetness.
But I am swallowing now and it’s as if the light has wrapped the greatest gift of all inside its bright shining:
An entire landscape of love brighter than the sun we cannot always see.
A landscape of love that the darkness cannot hide forever.
An advent.
THE advent.
A coming that the darkness is powerless to stop.
A coming that has found us.
Found us cupping flickering candles within our souls, moving forward now in a darkness that has become, in this moment, nothing more than a place where the light of this love might embrace us all with greatest effect.
But there is one vital condition to answer this prayer.
One great big IF:
Only if we allow that light within us now to shine outward in every direction and into every hidden corner and cul-de-sac.
If we become fragments of light.
Small miracles that can make all the difference.
Pushing back against the darkness that tells everyone in the world in quaking headlines that there is no God and that they are not—and could never, ever be—loved.
Luminous shards of singing light that seem to have fallen from somewhere among the stars.
Somewhere beyond the sky.
Somewhere beyond the most distant piece of the last thing that our eyes can see.
Coming from that which the darkness denies.
Risen even somewhere here in the world.
Rising, some day, all over the earth.