Advent Week 4: The Longest Night
Affliction tells the truth about the world. Love tells the truth about what holds it. The paradox is not resolved, but it is held.
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well… For there is a force of love moving through the universe that holds us fast and will never let us go.”
— Julian of Norwich (c. 1342–1416)
Today is the shortest day of the year.
It isn’t hard to imagine our ancestors, thousands of years ago, orienting their lives by the actual rising and setting of the sun—the turning of the seasons, the balance of warmth and cold, when they could plant, tend, harvest, and store. Light wasn’t ambient. It wasn’t assumed. The day and the season told them when to work, when to rest, when to hope.
For us, this way of living is foreign. Our un-rooted lives are open twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year—electricity, smartphones, Wi-Fi, Walmart supercenters glowing in the distance, beacons of car batteries, medicines, and ready-to-eat food. (I’m not complaining. I love Wi-Fi, Diet Coke, and on-demand antibiotics.) The seasons and darkness no longer tell us when to stop. But for those who came before us, a story or a myth that brought love and light into the darkest part of the year wasn’t decorative. It was life-bearing.
In Rome, that story took the form of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, celebrated on December 25. Rome also observed Saturnalia, a mid-December season of reversal and mercy, where slaves and masters exchanged roles and gifts were given freely. Farther north, in Norse and Germanic lands, Yule marked the turning of the year. Evergreen trees were honored as signs of life that refuse to die, and the Yule log burned for days to call the sun back. In Celtic Britain, myth spoke of two kings locked in an annual struggle: the Holly King, ruler of the dark half of the year, and the Oak King, reborn at the solstice.
All these myths tell a variation of the same pattern I named in the first Advent post: exile bends toward return. Suffering paves the path for redemption. Love doesn’t erase darkness—it outlasts it. Threaded through all of these stories is the same quiet message: life must be insisted upon.
What makes that insistence possible is love—not as sentiment or softness, but as a convergence of defiant hope, peace, joy, and attention. Love is what keeps us here when leaving would be easier. It is what allows us to stay awake to the world without turning away.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
— 1 Corinthians 13:7 (NRSV)
Simone Weil, our philosopher this Advent, called this insistence attention. For her, to love was to look without flinching—to remain present to affliction without consolation or denial. This is not optimism. It is endurance with eyes open.
Sometimes Weil’s insistence upon affliction and what she called decreation—the dismantling of the ego—feels stark. Decreation is necessary. It creates space for God by undoing the false self. But we cannot stop there. If we do not follow that movement forward into love, we risk nihilism. I wrestled with this for years. It felt incomplete.
Until I stumbled across Julian of Norwich.
I didn’t know it was still possible to meet a new mystic. I thought I’d read them all, in my recursive, obsessive (often arrogant) desire to understand God.
A brief aside about Julian: she was a fourteenth-century anchoress, enclosed in a small cell attached to a parish church, living in consecrated solitude—praying, writing, offering people advice through a small window. She ate simply and lived deliberately. (Does the Catholic Church still do this? Where can I sign up? Sophie has to come too. Julian is often painted with a cat, so I think it’s fine. Sophie is cat-sized. DM me if you know.)
Listen—Julian was a quiet badass. She spent nearly thirty years writing Revelations of Divine Love, reflecting on a near-death experience she had at around age thirty. I’m only halfway through the book because I want to savor reading it for the first time—and because it’s so dense I can only read it first thing in the morning, when my brain is at full power.
Julian’s premise is simple and profound: all things exist because God loves them. Her theology is famously centered on an image of a tiny acorn, held in the palm of her hand. Everything that is and ever will be is contained in the smallest potential.
Like Weil, Julian understood affliction. For her, near death opened the way for God to descend. Unlike Weil, who died very young, Julian’s faith withstood time. This matters.
Julian does not minimize suffering, but she refused to grant it the final word. Where Weil names affliction without escape, Julian names love without limit. Between them there is no contradiction—only deep accord. Affliction tells the truth about the world. Love tells the truth about what holds it. The paradox is not resolved, but it is held.
“It lasts, and ever shall, because God loves it.”— Julian of Norwich
As we arrive at the final week of Advent, it is love we are asked to attend to—not after the darkness has passed, but precisely here, at its deepest point.
This is where Christianity makes its claim. Not as myth or symbol alone, but as flesh.
“Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.” — Luke 2:10
The renewal of hope, joy, faith, and love arrives not as an idea, but as a human being—Jesus of Nazareth, God made manifest, born not in a palace but in a manger, to refugee parents, in occupation, poverty, and risk.
Light does not descend from above, untouched. It enters from below.
Empires and institutions rise and fall. They always do. Rome is a memory. Its gods are footnotes. Those who crushed Jesus matter little now, their power dissolved into dust and textbooks. And yet this child, born in obscurity, still speaks—like Julian’s tiny acorn, planted deep in the earth, now a forest.
“For to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” — Luke 2:11 (NRSV)
This is the insistence Christianity makes in the longest night: that love does not conquer by force, that power is revealed through vulnerability, that God does not wait for the world to become safe or orderly or bright enough. Love takes a body, a fragile one, and asks a human woman to care for it.
Honestly, if there is a better story, I’ve never read it. The creator of the universe (universes?) incarnates on planet Earth as an infant, born to a teenage mother, in a manger? Born not to raise armies or destroy Rome, but to teach an upside down ethic about how to be in the world? His message was fundamentally misunderstood in his life by those in authority - and it would be today too.
“But I am among you as one who serves.”— Luke 22:27
The message endures not because it was enforced or protected by power, but because it inverted power itself. Jesus named love not as domination, but as service—an ethic so opposed to earthly power, in all it forms, that it could not be absorbed, only resisted or received. (This is why it is so necessary for us to press back against the tide of dark Christianity now aligned with power.)
Merry Christmas. May the light and love find you—today and always.
Author’s Note: Paradox
I don’t hold paradox because I am undecided or afraid to commit. I hold it because reality resists simplification, and any faith that resolves tension too quickly usually does so by lying. Suffering is real. So is love. Neither cancels the other.
For years, I thought integrity required a choice: name affliction honestly and risk despair, or insist on love and risk sentimentality. What I have learned—slowly, and with resistance—is that truth lives in the tension. Darkness must not be minimized. Love must not be denied the final word.
Paradox is discipline. It forces attention. It refuses false consolation without surrendering to despair. It says: this hurts, and this is held.
Julian was right. It lasts, and ever shall, because God loves it.
Incarnation itself is paradox. I want to see the face of God, and I also have to get an infusion. What do you do with that except sit in it—and trust that love is not absent from the tension, but holding it fast?
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”— John 1:5