The Collapse CXCVII: The First Advent Candle

30 November 20XX+1

My Dear Lucilius:

Pompeia Paulina announced to me today that it was the first day of Advent and we would be lighting an Advent Wreath.

Unaware as I was of the advent (no pun intended) of Thanksgiving, I was even less so of the Advent season. I suspect most of that is a combination of things: Christmases for years on my own combined with a loss of the traditions that once upon a time marked this time and a series of churches for which the traditional season of Advent was more of a mention than an actual practice.

That, apparently, has changed this year.

Pompeia Paulina had brought out some candles and had a wreath (a back-up wreath, she assured me; the “good” one was with Young Xerxes and Stateira for their first Christmas) and set it up on our table. The candles – three purple, one pink and one white in the center – sat amid a psuedo-greenery that was clearly not from around here at all.

She had me light one of the purple candles -a taper somewhat burned, clearly used from its charred wick and the runnels of wax down its side. The candle looked strangely cheery in its fake pine branches, as candles often seem to do in the semi-dark of cloud cover days and early evenings.

I looked at her. I admitted that I remembered nothing about this other than the candle lighting.

She smiled back at me. This is the first candle of Advent, she said, the candle of Hope. It is meant to remind us of the Old Testament prophets, who preached the coming of the Messiah through the vicissitudes of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah and the Captivity and Return – and who, through all of it, had the hope of God’s promise.

I admit I teared up.

Hope. How long it seems that we – really, I – have been without such a thing.

It has been said, Lucilius, that Hope is something that we can manufacture if needed. And it has certainly been needed for a while now.

It can take many forms with others, be it continually saying things will get better or providing plans and ideas for how to exist through one season to get to another. Without hope, people eventually give up and die – because living when one day is like another and only leading to worse days will crush the human spirit in irrevocable ways.

But while I can generate Hope for others, I struggle to generate it for myself.

Yes yes, I understand the religious aspect of it and that – at least from a Christian point of view – we hope in something beyond ourselves. But that sense of Hope of salvation can seem bleak in world where the walls feel as if they are closing in and every initiative seems to peter out before it gets started.

Which is why, I suppose, we need others around us to help us find that Hope as well.

We stood there, hand in hand, watching the candle burn, a true orange-yellow flame that went straight up in the cloudy light of Winter’s sky. We read Matthew 4:16: “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and upon those who sat in the region and shadow of death, Light had dawned”.

And then we blew the candle out – after all, we have to light this at least four more times this year and one should be practical, now above all times.

And perhaps, Lucilius, that is the very nature of Hope itself: to blow something out, believing that you will need it again.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca