An Advent Calendar: Day 4

"London. ... Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth. ... Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. ... Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. ... Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look. ...

On such an afternoon, if ever, ..."

This fragment from Charles Dickens' Bleak House gives us a glimpse (foggy, muddy, half-perceptible) of nineteenth-century London, more specifically of a November in nineteenth-century London. Things are as if half-seen, dark, and ill-tempered. But must this be nineteenth-century London? Could this not be any-century any-city, and any other November of inner-outer gloom? Could this not be B.C., as much as A.D.? Are we all - them, in that London; us, today; and any-November, in any-place - are we all not equally in the same desperate need for a permanent dissipation of the gloom, and for the arrival (advent) of a lasting light? Plus ça change... the more it changes, the more it stays the same; the same state, this natural state, the human condition, and its deep and indelible need for a change, a transformation, that is not transitory and impermanent, no longer just socio-political or economic - but existential, everlasting, and definitive. 

Advent is a time of expectation during which we can become again aware of this deep and fundamental human need and longing... by realizing again the contrast between the ever-November of any place and any moment in human history, and the coming Nativity of the everlasting Light that we all desire.