Most Advent wreaths are a circle, living green branches
going around and around without beginning or end, with the Christ candle white
and pure in the center. This one is a spiral, starting at the far edge and
winding closer and closer with each day of Advent. I light one candle a day
instead of one a week, and as the days of December go by, the outer candles shrink
and the light grows and the anticipation builds, and then all at once there’s
only one candle left in the very center: the Christ candle.
And it’s perfect, still. Tall and smooth, it’s top narrowing
to a white wick, not charred black and pinched off like the rest. All of Advent
leads to this: to Jesus, the Perfect One. And it’s here in the exhausted dark
of the morning, when the only glow comes from these twenty-four candles, that something
catches my eye.
It’s a flicker of light caught in a glassy drip. The pooling
wax at the top of the candle closest to me has spilled over, rolling slowly
down the side, and the light of twenty-four candles dances through it. I watch its
gradual fall; follow the trail down the side of the candle as it slowly clouds over
and cools; see it puddle at the base of the candle; watch the spot of wood
disappear beneath the tiny blot of hardened wax.
So strange. This liquid, rolling down clear and unhindered, is
the same material that forms the hard, opaque pillars. For that brief moment,
the heat from the flame melted it and it fell like an unchecked tear, and the
candle is marred by it: instead of a perfect white taper, it’s now bumpy
and uneven, with jagged edges and mounded folds at the base.
It’s like I’m seeing this for the first time, this metaphor
for Advent… and Christmas… and really all of life. We’re all trying so hard to
make the things in our lives not just look perfect, but be perfect. But
when Truth comes, like the burning flame on the candles, the forced chokehold
we have on our lives softens and melts away, exposing the truths about
ourselves we’ve long hidden.
Disappointment. Guilt. Sadness. Shame.
All these and more, and all names for this:
I thought it
would be better. I thought I would be better.
Advent is this lighting of candles, this walk toward Christmas,
but part of that walk is realizing the desperation that called for Christ to
come into this world in the first place. The sickness and the dying; the broken
promises and failed relationships; the hard things we wake up to and struggle through
day after day after day. Even at—or especially at—Christmas time.
But peace comes. Because waiting at the end of Advent is
this one great Truth; this one great Grace.
For God so loved.
For God so loved the world, it says. And in that, it’s
saying God so loved me, in all my failures, seen and unseen; God so loved you,
in all that you are not but want to be; God so loved us all in spite of all that we
are, that he gave his only son Jesus to us at Christmas. Jesus, who is as perfect and whole as the Christ candle at
the center of the Advent wreath.
Jesus comes to us and wraps us up in a love
that says, “You don’t have to be perfect. Just rest in me; me who is perfect
love incarnate. In my perfect love, you will find wholeness and peace.”
And something about that love changes the way I look at
those melted candles. Something about that love takes the rippled wax—the ripped
places of my heart—and turns them into arms upheld to a God who takes hold of
me and never lets go.
