Lighting The Dark

an Advent calendar for tender times

✨ Welcome and thank you for joining me on this journey to find glimpses of light in dark times. If this is your first email, you can read an introduction to the project here and find links to catch up with any posts you’ve missed at the end of this email.

We are now in the second week of Advent, when it is traditional to burn a candle for peace alongside the candle for hope lit in week 1. Peace is the theme running through all this week’s offerings. ✨

The Ice-Cream Man poem I shared yesterday seemed to touch so many of you – thank you for all your messages. So, as our second Advent candle continues to burn, I’ve decided that we will linger a little longer in Northern Ireland exploring what its wild landscape and troubled history might be able to tell us about peace.

I’ve chosen to share a passage from Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s breathtaking memoir Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home. Kerri was born just five years before the ice-cream man was killed. Had she lived in Belfast, she might have been able to recite all his flavours off by heart. But she was born - to a Catholic mother and Protestant father - in Derry, the city most severely affected by the Troubles.

Her memoir explores the psychological impact of growing up in a place choking on sectarian tension and violence. It’s a dazzlingly poetic though often harrowing read, a book that explores the ways trauma gets lodged in the body as is so often passed down generations. This calendar is about finding light in the darkness and I wanted to share Kerri’s writing because, in the end, hers is a story about recovery, redemption and hard-won political and personal peace.

Back at the start of the calendar, I introduced Advent as a season of waiting in the dark, keeping faith in an unknown future. The passage I’ve chosen from Thin Places speaks to exactly this. In it, Kerri tells us she was born right in the midst of the Troubles – both geographically and historically. We know now that better days were to come for the people of Northern Ireland, but they did not know that then. Their task in the 1980s was to hold onto hope amid horror and to keep believing that peace might one day be possible.

I was born into the middle of this violence, at its exact midway point: 1983. Although no one could have known it, on that cold winter’s day in Derry. No one has even an inkling, back then, but they are halfway through those dark years. They are over the hump of the hill. The violence that has been filling their every waking day, their every sleepless night, will be brought to an end. The kidnapping and terrorising, the bombing and burning, the mauling and murdering, is not going to last forever. We do not know yet the journey that the land on which we live, and all of us who live on it, will make. We do not yet know the lengths and breadths, the words and actions, the negotiating that will be required to take us from being a land of violence to a land of (more or less) peace.

Some of us, in fact, may never know the ins and outs of this process, our journey towards peace in the North of Ireland, our Peace Process. We will not know of the words whispered between people, between humans that had never before broken breath to one another. We may never know of the bargains and sacrifices made, of the leaps of something – something unthinkable – that were taken. Leaps of something that feels much stronger, even, than sheer “faith.” That border has seen it all – every last trace of the violence, bloodshed, silence, trust – the peace that has been carefully and sensitively shaped. A peace as delicate as the wings of a moth.

I wrote to Kerri yesterday to ask if I could share a glimpse of her story as well as to ask her birth date. I was curious about whether she had been born during the actual weeks of Advent as well as during the advent of peace. She wrote back: “Sophie, my birthday is on 28 December, one of the darkest days In history. The slaughter of the innocents. This year I turn 40 and will be holding the children of Gaza with me in my heart on that day more than ever.”

As I write, I am thinking not only of the innocents massacred in Gaza and southern Israel, but of children suffering wherever fear and violence have become the norm: in Myanmar, in the Magreb, in Ukraine, in Sudan, in parts of Mexico, Somalia, Columbia, Libya and too many other war-torn countries. There can be no denying the trauma these children are absorbing into their minds and bodies, but Kerri’s memoir gives me hope that with loving help and support, healing is possible, and meaningful lives can rise up from the rubble.

Though war may dominate the headlines, it is not the only story. There is another, less heralded, story this Advent of peace being forged in hearts and minds, across garden fences and around international conference tables. Thin Places reminded me that such peace can ever be taken for granted, that it is daily and ongoing work. But that it is possible.

Kerri writes a regular Substack called g l i m m e r s in which she explores the experiences in daily life that can help calm frayed nervous systems and return us to a safe and settled state. Hers is a luminous voice forged in darkness, and I hope you’ll seek out more of her vivid words. 

With light from my Advent candles to yours,

Sophie ✨

Lighting The Dark is an online Advent Calendar compiled by Sophie Howarth. If you would like to invite family and friends to join you in receiving it, the sign-up link is here.

If you have just arrived, welcome and thank you for sharing in the mystery and possibility of Advent with me. You can find an introduction to the project on December 1 and catch up with posts sent on December 2, December 3, December 4, December 5, December 6, December 7, December 8, December 9, December 10, December 11, December 12 and December 13.