"Winter Blues" by Todd Klassy, on Flickr

From a sermon for Advent 1 by Catherine A. Caimano entitled, "Why Advent is the hardest of times for faithful Christians:"

Our faith is about how Jesus Christ, born into this world as a small spot of light in the darkness, helps us to believe, and to live like we believe, that love and forgiveness and redemption and hope have a part in every choice that we make, in every regular day on our calendar.

And this sense of preparation, of not knowing when it is that we will most need to be ready, is not meant to scare us; it is meant to remind us that the kingdom of heaven is everywhere, even when we least expect it. And we need this reminder, because we all know that our regular life, despite our beliefs, often feels like it forces us to put on all kinds of other things: deadlines and debts and distractions and all sorts of dire circumstances that can lead us to live like the darkness is catching up to us.

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Advent preparation, then, although it is a solemn time, is really about going right through the darkness, rather than trying to circumvent it altogether. In order to cast it away, we need to get a really good grip on it; we need to strip off what would normally hide it, as counterproductive as this seems.

Because the true light, the true joy that we are getting ready for, is not something that we create or that we find; it is what comes to us when we are ready and waiting for it. To put on the armor of light is to rejoice that we have marched right into this darkness and found that we are not alone. We will not be left in our suffering; we will be met with hope and peace and love in the moments that we dare to take off the kinds of armor that the rest of the world seems to demand that we wear -- cynicism and defensiveness and isolation and fear.