Recognizing the saint of "the year's midnight" amidst the year's pandemic grief.
Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
John Donne // A Nocturnal Upon Saint Lucy’s Day
Before the calendar was reformed, the longest night of the year—the winter solstice—fell on the thirteenth of December. It is not a coincidence that the murdered girl whose name means “light” should be remembered on this day. Venerated in both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, it is in the Lutheran north that she is perhaps most dearly celebrated. Throughout Scandinavia, entire towns, and many households too, designate a young woman to become Sankta Lucia for the day. She wears a white dress with a red sash, and her head is wreathed in greenery and candles. The story goes that Lucia, a young virgin in 4th century Syracuse, would wear this wreath of light so that her hands were free to carry food and supplies to persecuted Christians hiding in the catacombs. She has been preserved throughout the centuries as a being of light, emerging only at what John Donne called “the year’s midnight.”
I have felt a strange sort of draw towards Saint Lucia... This is, I suppose, related to my fascination with the season of Advent, those days where darkness is recognized and welcomed as a necessary preparation for the light.
I feel myself approaching this yearly midnight now, the final hour in a year that has felt mostly like a long spiral towards darkness. I sit in my parent’s home in New Mexico, watching darkness purl, spinning precipitation in the space over the Sandia Mountains. We have drawn a fire in the living room and we inhale the sweetness of burning juniper. It starts to snow so suddenly that we do not even see it begin.
I have felt a strange sort of draw towards Saint Lucia ever since I first learned of the Scandinavian traditions surrounding her. This is, I suppose, related to my fascination with the season of Advent, those days where darkness is recognized and welcomed as a necessary preparation for the light. In the modern world, and especially in the west, we have to consciously fight the temptation to pretend that the darkness doesn’t exist. Feast days like Saint Lucia’s celebrate light not by ignoring but by being fully present in these longest of nights. When we light our Advent candles, it is not a vain struggle against the darkness, but rather a humble sign that we consent to make our home in it for a while.
It feels like last year’s Advent never fully ended but instead lingered well beyond Christmas, stretching and deepening into a full year of waiting.
Since making my home in Romania, I have picked up the habit of marking certain parts of the year following the Orthodox tradition. Their Nativity fast begins forty days before Christmas. Last year I imperfectly practiced this fast—no animal products and no alcohol—because I wanted to feel that sense of waiting in my body. I am not quite sure how to mark Advent this year, as it feels like last year’s Advent never fully ended but instead lingered well beyond Christmas, stretching and deepening into a full year of waiting. My body feels saturated with it.
Today’s snow itself makes me feel like I’ve pulled a full circle. It snowed as if the world was ending back in March, in Romania, the morning I had to leave behind what felt like my whole world. My American supervisors had decided that, in the panic of closing borders and overflowing hospitals, I shouldn’t stay abroad. In the two days I was given to clean my apartment and pack what I could of my life into one checked bag, I realized I had no idea how long I was packing for. I threw in my shorts, just in case I wasn’t able to return before summer.
* * *
In August, I began to lose my vision in my left eye. I would close it, then the other, trying to gauge the growing difference between them, trying to come up with some not wholly terrible explanation. For a while I chalked it up to a wrong prescription, but eventually I had to come to terms with the fact that in my nearly two decades of glasses-wearing, I had never seen anything like this. When I closed my good right eye, the world folded in the center, warped as if in water. I wondered with a tightness in my chest what it was like to go blind. I saw my vision folding in on itself until my life disappeared before me.
The morning of my appointment with the ophthalmologist, I got an email from my supervisor, clearing me to start making plans for my return to Romania. I felt almost nothing reading those words that I had waited five months for.
That afternoon I was diagnosed with ocular histoplasmosis. My eyes were permanently scarred from a systemic infection I had apparently suffered at some point in my life. Most people don’t know they’ve had it, the doctors told me, because it passes like a cold, or a flu, and the scars it leaves behind are asymptomatic. These scars only pose a problem if, years or even decades after forming, they spontaneously lead to new blood vessel growth. Which was, of course, what had happened in my case. Within fifteen minutes of giving me the diagnosis they had started my treatment, a monthly injection directly into my affected eye. The prognosis, they told me, was probably good for recovering the vision that had been lost, but it would take at least three months.
There are no shortcuts to waiting, no quick paths out of darkness.
The relief of learning that my diagnosis was one of the treatable ones was tempered by the deep-seated understanding that some sort of illusion had been broken in me and could never be restored. I felt growing, in the very center of me, a profound stillness that forced me to look plainly upon my own despair. Our bodies, I saw, were soft and unknowable and so easily undermined from within or without. Our eyes, our very instruments of light, could be lost—it would be so easy—and that loss could stretch out forever before us. I had been living with the seeds of blindness in my body likely since childhood. Now I had to carry that awareness with me, too.
There are no shortcuts to waiting, no quick paths out of darkness. The uncertain months that had stretched behind me now reached out before me with an even deeper sense of vulnerability, and with a lurch of dread I knew that if I couldn’t learn to love the waiting, and if I couldn’t learn to love the darkness, I would never be able to love my life.
* * *
I sit now with this November day before me, its coldness swirling wild under my skin. The vision that for a while seemed to smooth out encouragingly with the monthly treatments has crumpled to a state worse than before. The doctors do not know why, but will continue treatment with another medication, another three months. If I close my right eye now, it is only with great difficulty that I can read, or decipher the features of my own face in the mirror. My vision is flecked through with a certain kind of darkness—or is it an emptiness? I suppose the only accurate word for it is loss; whether it is a loss of light or of substance is really of no consequence. I haven’t learned to love this, but I think I’ve been able to hate it a little less, and that in and of itself feels like a miracle.
These saints, I have come to understand, are remembered for two things: their best acts of love, and their deepest sufferings.
The Orthodox put images of the saints on their walls to remind them that the divine can be embodied in human flesh. We have to see it to believe it, because mostly it feels like an impossibility. These saints, I have come to understand, are remembered for two things: their best acts of love, and their deepest sufferings. The Saint Lucia of Scandinavia is forever robed in the former: an eternal figure of light, offering food and hope to those in darkness. I knew little of her suffering until just this month, when by chance I found some distinctly different images of Lucia. In her painted icons, she does not wear the wreath of candles, nor does she offer a plate of saffron buns as do the Scandinavian girls. Instead, she holds, on a plate, a pair of eyes. During her martyrdom, I read, her eyes were gouged out, and then restored miraculously by God. Saint Lucia, as it would happen, is patron saint for the blind, and for those with diseases of the eye.
The world of light and shadows compels us to bear witness to all that we see, and all that we don’t. Perhaps we too shall be remembered for these dual identities: our moments of extending light, and our moments of bearing darkness. The next world is coming—be it Christmas, be it springtime, be it paradise, be it a new set of eyes—and every dead thing is remade if we submit ourselves to the quiet horror of loving it.
Comments