Christian Counseling Service -- Devotions

Light shines in the darkness

Tuesday, December 25, 2018

December 25, 2018
What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. From his fullness we have all received, grace in place of grace.

These bells that play
On Christmas Day
Their ringing settles me

Deep and wide and wild and sweet
Sounding my soul, listening for
Evidence of relationship

Sobs, bursts of song,
Long silences sometimes
For kin we are and kin we will remain

There was a man named Jayber, a barber, who needed some extra cash so he became the church gravedigger. Well, the gravedigger was also the one who rang the bells. So Jayber did. Sitting sometimes through the songs and sermons, he felt his paltry Christian faith growing just a bit.

Jayber listened to the sweet harmonics of the bells. Carried along, he floated in those long echoes, sounding across the valleys and knobs of Kentucky. And not just on Christmas Day.

My best duty was ringing the bell on Sunday morning. The bell rope came down into the vestibule through a hole bored in the ceiling. The rope was frayed where it had worked back and forth through the hole for a hundred years, and the hole was worn lopsided. You would feel the weight of the bell on its creaky bearings up in the steeple. You might have to swing it two or three times before the clapper would strike. And then it struck, and the sound of the bell bloomed out in all directions, into all the woods and hollows.
It was never easy for me to stop ringing the bell, I so delighted in that interval of pure sound between the clapper strokes. The bell, I thought, included everything, and in a way blessed it.

I step outside on this sweet and silent day of Jesus' birth. Lincoln Avenue is altogether quiet, traffic so rare it only punctuates the silence. This is one day, perhaps among many but special nonetheless, when it's easier to listen for God. "Whose words I hear I think I know."

There is more to Jayber's reverie:

At a certain point in the service some of the preachers who came to us would ask that we "observe a moment of silence." You could hear a little rustle as the people settled down into that deliberate cessation. And then the quiet of the empty church would come over us. It united us as we were not united even in singing, and the little sounds (maybe a birdsong) from the world outside would come in to us, and we would completely hear it.

Silence not for long, of course. "After all, the preacher was being paid to talk." The bells, understood by all, sounded across Kentucky a simple language of heaven.

Longfellow heard them like that, years before, standing Christmas Day on his Civil War city street. They pierced his personal grief and brought him home to his family of man:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep;
The wrong shall fail,
The right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.

* * *

Yes, Lord, you are peace to us. You are justice, you are love, and you are peace to us. We cannot spend this day, or any day, without you. Never leaving us, always holding us in the cleft of your rock, you share our silence, share our singing. You smile, and remind us all how never-alone we really are.

Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, 2000, pp. 163-164
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day", 1863

Devotions Archive

Light shines in the darkness

Tuesday, December 25, 2018