Holding a candle to the window

Holding a candle to the window

Thursday, December 14, 2017

I am the Lord, your God, who grasps your right hand. It is I who say to you, “Fear not, I will help you.” You shall rejoice in the Lord, and glory in the Holy One of Israel. – from Isaiah 41

At Mom’s house, which has always been a treasureland of old books, I found a “fourth impression” of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous tale of Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles. On the frontispiece it is inscribed, “Merry Christmas to Harry from Albert and Linda.” This particular copy was printed the same year Conan Doyle published: 1902. And the inscription’s elegant penmanship, so much more common then than now, proves it.

The dark red book without a paper sleeve sports a small square cover picture of a handsome man smoking a pipe. Holmes? The binding was falling apart, so I colored some of it with reddish crayon and taped it up, thereby relieving the book of any value to a collector. But it was worth it, because now I can read it! I can sit before the darkened winter windows of my own study, and turn dusty page after dusty page. As he always has, Sherlock Holmes will draw me in. I can’t wait.

Outside my window the wind howls in the dark. Surely that cannot be a hound. I at least imagine holding my candle to the window, melting a bit of the frost, trying to see. But of course, only someone standing in the dark can see in, might be seeing me. I see nothing, no one, and withdraw. The bed is turned down, the white sheets call me into sleep.

But Conan Doyle’s characters don’t stay inside. When danger threatens one, they all rise up. And of course they must leave their cozy corners, bundled up for storms, braving awful winds. Could I endure the howling?

Their primitive lights barely light their paths at all.

Can’t you just hear Isaiah’s words whispered into their ears? Or yours? “I am the Lord, your God, who grasps your right hand!”

What’s that you say? My ears prickle: “It is I who say to you, ‘Fear not, I will help you.’” Eyes wide open now. The path seems wider than it was.

On Doyle’s barren moors, other creatures stalk us. They don’t promise life, they threaten death. They thrive on terror and insist on being feared. Must I give in, fall headlong, panicked into that breathless maw? Will I just let the unholy incubus swallow me up and spit me out?

Holmes less-than-religious rationality says NO! But Holmes is like a 19^th century Dr. Spock. Most all of us are just not like that. Can I too say NO?

Because, in my inner ear I hear a different sound, and the words rush toward the center of my soul: “Fear not, for I will help you.”

We shall rejoice in you, Lord, and glory in the Holy One of Israel. Can I proclaim you somehow to the skies, that all may see and know, observe and understand, that the hand of the Lord has done this? Your word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.

http://www.davesandel.net/category/advent-and-christmas-devotions-2017/

http://www.christiancounselingservice.com/archived_devotions.php?article_id=1628