The Day The Light Comes Back

The house sits under the ridge, which is lovely in June and a fact of life in December.

From about the tenth of November the sun does not clear the top of that ridge at all. It comes up somewhere behind it and travels along behind it and goes down again, and the valley gets a kind of second-hand daylight, gray and even and shadowless, and the front of the house does not see the sun for the best part of three months. Everybody who lives there knows it. Nobody complains about it, in the way that people do not complain about the tide.

Sorcha had come back to the valley in September with her son and two suitcases, after a couple of years she did not talk about much.

By January she had noticed something about herself that she did not like. The year was not happening to her in parts. It was one long stretch of the same, and the days had stopped having edges. Monday, laundry, the drive, the same six aisles, dark at four. She could not have told you what month she had liked best in the previous three years, because they had not been shaped like anything. The year was just weather that kept arriving.

Her aunt Máire lived up the lane and had lived there forever, and on the doorframe of Máire's porch, low down, under three layers of paint, there is a pencil line and a date written in a slanted hand that stopped being anybody's living handwriting a long time ago.

The third of February.

Sorcha had assumed it was a birthday or a memorial. When she finally asked, Máire looked at her as though she had asked what the kettle was for.

That is the day the light comes back, she said. It comes over the ridge at about twenty past eleven and it lands on the step. My grandmother marked it. It moves a day or so either side, so we watch from the first.

They went, of course. The whole lot of them, on the third, at ten past eleven, in coats, standing about in the cold on a Tuesday morning, and Sorcha felt faintly ridiculous holding a mug in a garden waiting for a sunrise that had technically happened four hours earlier.

Then the top of the ridge went thin and gold, and the light came over it and down the field, and it crossed the wall and it landed on the front step and on all of them at once.

Somebody cheered. The dog lost his mind entirely. Máire's neighbor produced a flask and a tin, and Fergal and two cousins carried the kitchen table out through the door and set it on the step in the sun, and they had toast standing up in the light with their breath steaming.

It lasted eleven minutes. Then the sun went on along behind the shoulder of the ridge and the gray came back down over everything like a lid.

And Sorcha stood there in the cold with an empty mug and found, to her genuine surprise, that she was already thinking about next year.

She went inside and found the calendar on the back of the kitchen door and wrote it in the square for the third of February, with the pen on the string, before the toast was even cleared away.

He hung the clocks before there was anybody to read them

Two things get added to the subject of God's appointed times, and they pull in opposite directions, and both of them leave a person with nothing.

The first says the whole calendar is somebody else's business. Other people's dates, other people's family, a language you do not speak, a set of customs you would get wrong in front of everybody. So the year stays what it was: weather.

The second turns the appointments into an audit. A checklist with your attendance beside it, and the quiet suggestion that a person who keeps none of them is outside.

Take both off, and go back to the fourth day.

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.Genesis 1:14

Read what the lights were hung for. Not warmth, not decoration. Signs, and seasons, and days, and years. And the word underneath the one we translate as seasons is not about the weather at all. It is the word for an appointment, a fixed meeting, a time somebody has arranged to be somewhere.

So on the fourth day, before there was a single person on the earth to keep an appointment, God hung the clocks. The calendar is older than the people who keep it, which means it was never a burden invented later and dropped on somebody's shoulders. It was in the sky before anybody had shoulders.

You are living inside a year that Somebody arranged, and that is true of your ordinary Tuesday as much as of anybody's high day. Genesis 1:14 puts the appointments in the sky on the fourth day, and it is His Spirit who makes a verse from the first page feel like an invitation with your own name on it.

Then in Leviticus 23 the appointed times are listed out, and the phrase that keeps coming back is worth noticing. He calls them holy convocations, which means a calling together. A summons to a gathering. Not an examination, not an inspection. Somebody calling across a yard that it is time, come on, we are starting.

You have been called rather than counted, and the difference between those two words is the whole difference between a feast and an audit. Leviticus 23:2 has God calling them my feasts, His own, and the same Spirit who put that possessive there is the one settling it into a person who has spent years assuming they were on the outside of it.

And here is the thing that keeps them from ever becoming heavy. They point forward. Paul calls what pointed ahead a shadow of things to come, and says the body casting the shadow is Christ, and he says it in a sentence whose whole purpose is to stop people judging each other about days. Which is why this page is not going to tell you which ones you are obliged to keep. That argument belongs somewhere else and it will not be settled here, and there is nobody who fails this page.

What a shadow does is prove there is a body. What a rehearsal does is prove there is a performance.

And Jesus made the appointment out loud, at a table, with bread in His hands, on the night before He was given. He said He would not drink of the fruit of the vine again until the day He drinks it new with His own in His Father's kingdom.

He booked a table. That is what that sentence is. There is a date in the diary of God with a meal on it, and you are expected at it. Matthew 26:29 has Him saying so out loud with the cup still in His hand, and His Spirit is what keeps that from being a lovely old line and makes it an invitation with your name on it.