To Walk by Lantern Light
To Walk by Lantern Light
Caroline Jane Kelly
The early winter nights are blue, and when there are just enough wisps of cloud pinned to the sky, rose and lavender wash the Boston skyline from the Prospect Hill Tower across the Charles River at four in the afternoon. Funny, on these still surprisingly short December days, that so much of what I see is light. Butter yellow kitchen lights glow out of windows in the dusk as I run through Harvard. The trees on Commonwealth Avenue are entwined with thousands of tiny bulbs stitching a canopy of light through the bare branches, and on either side, string lights drape banisters and balcony railings. Watercolor lights shimmer impermanently on the duck pond in the Public Garden, flanked by white globes lighting the way along the bridge. In the living room bay window of my own apartment, a garland of lights illuminates the paper ornaments and felt animals on the Christmas tree we carried home from a local preschool’s fundraiser. It’s curious to me, as a person who always mourns the end of summer and the long lingering evenings, that even as the northern hemisphere spins into winter darkness, light meets me at every turn.
*
Art and literature are full of pilgrims traveling through shadows and darkness, through treacherous country, with little to illuminate their way: Christian, Odysseus, Huck and Jim, the Joads. I love the imagery of walking by lantern light on dangerous paths, whether holding the torch to brighten your own solitary way or to keep a companion from stumbling. Perhaps I love that theme because it’s reminiscent of the prodigal returning home. And if there is any parable in scripture that I feel reverberating through the depths of myself, it is that of the wandering child.
I moved to Boston in September of this year, never having lived in a city. It was a matter of days before I longed for the small-town countryside again. One early evening in October I walked through the streets of my neighborhood and despite knowing that I was still so new and needed to give it time, I felt the tightening fear: that everything I'd been so excited for would turn out just the way it had when I was 20 and transferred colleges and endured the most miserable, friendless year of my life. I could feel myself drawing into myself, into the safe darkness that’s only safe till it becomes too full and boils over. God wouldn’t really do this to me again, I thought. I wasn't asking for a happily ever after, only companions to light the way beside me.
Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide, reads the inscription at the beginning of each Everyman’s Pocket Library edition book, in thy most need to go by thy side. The words are from a medieval morality play, but after a thousand years they still cut to the quick. I could almost see myself on that walk as if from the third-person perspective, alone and afraid to be and afraid not to be and afraid to trust that anyone would care enough to go by my side. But going before me on the cracked sidewalk outside the Victorian houses (a cat in one window, a dog in another) was the lamp unto my feet. And it has always been this way. Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light. So go the words to the hymn “Be Thou My Vision,” or “Bì Thusa ‘mo Shúile” in its original language. Sung in Irish, the familiar melody is at once both hauntingly desolate and yet comforting, its ancient history underlining the truth of its lyrics. The God of medieval Ireland is the same God who lights my path in modern Boston, the wisdom and the true word, and to paraphrase the Gospel of John, in that true word is light.
*
On a recent Sunday morning, as morning light washed the stained-glass windows in the temple my church meets in, the words of our youth pastor spoke right to me: My identity is still beloved, he preached, because my identity was never found in the worst un-truths I believed about myself—unloved, unfavored, cast out—but in the God who made me. The Father who loved, loves, and will love me, and to borrow a favorite phrase from the pulpit, “there’s nothing you can do about it.”
A good father does not leave his child behind. He runs out to meet him on the road, he kisses him, he prepares a table for the undeserving. He comes back. When I dwell on it, I find it disconcerting that to know love, we must be known. But Isaiah 40 promises that God as shepherd will gather us in his arms and carry us close to his heart—close to the heart of God! How will we stand it, that love? Will we remember anything that came before, the treacherous darkness, the long odyssey, even the fear of being fully known? I imagine that moment will be like “the world revolved from night to day” that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote about in his poem “Christmas Bells,” the evil things coming undone in the true light of day.
Someday, what we long for now in the darkness will be past tense. We won't be waiting on Emmanuel but rejoicing with him. We’ll no longer walk this dimly lit path but instead walk side-by-side with Him. And the dark dream at the beginning will be only that.
*
I am tired of being told that we are tired. I am tired of the constant reminder that life is not “normal,” because this is life, whether or not it’s the one we imagined, whether or not we anticipated the darkness of the past twenty months. We still await the coming of the true light, as we did then, but it rings of a truer sweetness now, a sharp pang accompanying what may have once been a complacent hope. In dim churches on Christmas Eve, hot wax dripping on our hands from a hundred lit candles, we sing that all is calm; all is bright. But when will our long-expected Savior come to lead us up out of exile? See, I am afraid of the dark. Not the absence of light or the long night of the winter solstice, but of losing the Love that formed me.
“Wild and sweet.” Those are the descriptors Longfellow used for his sentiment of peace when he heard the peel of the Christmas bells in 1864 as America was torn asunder, like a combat surgeon amputating gangrenous limbs. Peace on the bloody earth? Not from North to South, as wounded soldiers filled every structure in Gettysburg and the bodies laid draped one across another in the thick beds of wildflowers along the Tennessee River at Shiloh. Families were ravaged, whether by the grapeshot, the bayonet, or the deadlocked ideologies. The death toll was the highest of any war in American history. It must have seemed like the end of the world, and it makes me wonder if every generation of Christians is convinced of the Lord’s coming in their lifetime. And how many didn’t dread but instead longed for it?
*
“Good morning, ladies!” says the postwoman with a bright smile as we pass her on the sidewalk on our way to the train. At a production of The Nutcracker, we get distracted looking for the restroom by a hall of mirrors in the stunning Boston Opera House, and stop to take a photo before hurrying on. The restroom attendant tells us to come back, saying “Stand here beside me,” to show us a magical view of a corridor of never-ending mirrors, like something out of Clara’s dream in the ballet. She seems so happy that we’re happy. And during the show in the seats beside us, the children laugh with abandon when the bear pops from the gift box and dances to the happy cheers of a packed house—laughter like bells.
It seems so simple, almost naïve, to trace beauty and light through a year whose tragedies need no further highlighting. Where wickedness exists, as it always will until our Savior returns, the cynics trip over themselves to deride the hopeful. Longfellow knew this, echoed in his words, “for hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, good-will to men!” But I’ve never found that hope, neither in our day nor in Longfellow’s when devastation hung with the gun smoke over the battlefields, is a cheap commodity. There is no hope without grace, and grace is costly. So we wait for our Lord with justified hope, prodigals stumbling the way home with lanterns lit just enough to see the path—waiting for the world to revolve from night to day, for “a voice, a chime, a chant sublime,” our ransom, good and holy, wild and sweet.
I’ve lost count of the number of times the Lord has met me with glimmers of the beauty that stirs me, glimpses of His presence to remind me that it’s He who keeps me, not I. He holds the lantern that illuminates the way. These occurrences shine out like starlight rending a black velvet sky, reassurance that I’ve seen only the bare edge of the goodness He has prepared for me. Someday, in the light, He will show me the rest.
Caroline Jane Kelly
Writer
Raised in the south and now living in New England, Caroline Kelly is a writer exploring themes of grace and home as she works on her first novel. She loves ‘70s music, flat coastlines, American literature, and the Gospel of John.
Photography by Artem Kovalev