An Advent Calendar: Day 2

Today I would like to point you to a fragment from an Ingmar Bergman movie, Winter Light, movie that is part of his trilogy on faith, and, in fact, of Bergman's long-standing grappling with, and meditation on, faith, unbelief, and the very possibility of faith within modernity (or, more precisely, in mid-twentieth century Western Europe, or Scandinavia). What sets Bergman's films apart (from the drift) is that they are actual works of art, and (at least in attempt) sincere depictions of the human experience. This means that the interpretation of these depictions is, at the end of it, at the disposal of the person who engages with the work; just like the interpretation of reality itself, of the same reality that we all inhabit, is different, depending on the person who "views" it (and how they view it - as one's "vision" is often eschewed, half-blind, maybe completely blind).  

The fragment I am pointing out starts at 1:04:51, and goes... well, it goes as far as you want to go with it. This fragment - and these fragments - will take you through the atmospheric "winter light" of the title; an atmosphere, though, that is desolate, as desolate as the Scandinavian landscape, and as the arid, maybe frozen, yet most suffering heart or soul of the main character. 

The movie, according to one interpretation, could be about a crisis of faith. On the other hand, if one sticks it out till the end, one will also hear talk about how the same suffering (and desolation) that the main character experiences, was also experienced (ponders another character) by Christ himself, on the cross. And, in that "light," we as viewers realize that the main character (the pastor) has the choice of experiencing and interpreting his suffering, his desolation, either as the manifestation of the absolute estrangement of God - or, in fact, as a sign of God's closeness to him (as his suffering becomes Christlike).

The wintry darkness of this Advent season, or of any time of expectation, of waiting, can thus be experienced as either the mark of an absolute absence - or as the perception of an absence that is the necessary corollary, and thus implicitly also the forerunner, of the arrival of the Presence. Because, as we have heard, faith and hope are the inner instruments that aid us in pursuing the things yet unseen.