TEN YEARS GONE: A Light That Cannot Be Cancelled (Revised for Lent)

 

From Christmas Eve to Lent — Why We Still Need the Light

First Published Thursday, December 24, 2015. Revised February 27, 2026

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.

— Isaiah 9

This reflection was first written on December 24, 2015, in the glow of Christmas Eve, when candles are lit and hymns rise easily.

At the time, the cultural conversation was noisy. There were arguments about whether Christmas was being diminished, politicized, defended, or overemphasized. I wrote with some of that tension in my pen. But the verse itself is older than any modern debate.

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”

That is not seasonal sentiment; it is human reality.

December dramatizes the image. The days shorten. The nights lengthen. The earth feels stripped and dormant. Ancient people watched the sun diminish and could easily have feared that it might not return. Light is not a luxury; it is survival.

Lent, though quieter than Advent, is also a season of light — but of a different kind. It is not the light of celebration so much as the light of examination. It is the light that exposes, that clarifies what is true and what is illusion. The light that does not merely warm, but reveals.

In 2015, I argued that even those who reject the theological claims of Christmas still benefit from its light — from music, gathering, generosity, beauty in the darkest stretch of winter. I still believe that. Yet ten years later, the deeper point feels less defensive and more universal.

Every human being walks through darkness at some point. There is cultural darkness, moral darkness, personal darkness — grief, fatigue, confusion, regret. We do not need to manufacture festivity in order to survive it. What we need is something that does not diminish when the days grow short.

Isaiah’s promise is that light has already broken in.

This is not because culture permits it, nor because the calendar encourages it, but because darkness does not have the final word. In December, that truth feels celebratory. In Lent, it feels essential. The light that Advent anticipates is the same light that Lent allows to search us more deeply.

Whether one names its source or not, every soul still reaches for light. And the ancient promise remains: those who walk in darkness do not remain there forever.