Theology Today - Vol 42, No. 3 - October 1985 - EDITORIAL - Keep Your Lamps Burning: Advent in the Arctic

359 - Keep Your Lamps Burning: Advent in the Arctic

Keep Your Lamps Burning: Advent in the Arctic
By Abby Arthur Johnson

"We really need the lights of Advent and Christmas," Kirsti Sydnes, first-grade teacher in Tromso, Norway, told me over a cup of coffee. Karl Jordell, instructor in pedagogy at the University of Tromso, expanded on the same theme over another cup of coffee. "November is the worst month," he explained. "In December, we have Advent and Christmas, and in January the sun comes back."

The lights of Advent, heralding the great promise of Christmas. have an important symbolic function in Christian parishes around the world. They have an added dimension in communities north of the Arctic Circle where they illumine the long polar night. Their brightness can be seen clearly in Tromso, 215 miles above the Arctic Circle. Tromso, my home from August 1983 to July 1984, has a population of 45,000 and is the largest city in the world so far north.

I

The lights of an Arctic Advent are perhaps best understood in relation to the dark time, called morketida in Norwegian. During morketida, the sun does not emerge above the horizon. This period, which in Tromso extends from November 23 to January 21, comes on very, rapidly. The area loses 10 to 15 minutes of light each day from the beginning of August to the start of the dark time. During the autumn, then, the local population watches the sun set progressively further to the south, finally to slip completely behind the mountains. For the next two months, the people of the far north live in darkness, relieved by only two to three hours of indirect or half light midday.

Advent, the first season of the church year, occurs during the most difficult period of morketida, described as the fifth season of the Arctic calendar by Erling W. Nilsen, director of the Tromso city museum "Skansen." The first Sunday in the 1983 Advent came on November 27, just four days after the start of morketida. Christmas Eve was only two clays after the winter solstice, the darkest time of the year.

The main newspaper in Tromso, Nordlys (Northern Lights) covered the beginnings of both morketida and Advent. It announced the former with a picture of two people standing under a street light and raising an umbrella against the dark and snow. The caption, translated from the

Abby Arthur Johnson is an editor with JRB Associates in Washington, D.C.. and she also serves as a lecturer in English at Georgetown University. In 1983, she and her husband, who was on a Fulbright scholarship, spent the Advent and Christmas season above the Arctic Circle, in Tromso. Norway. She here recounts her experiences of the long winter night and the promise of light.

360 - Keep Your Lamps Burning: Advent in the Arctic

Norwegian (like all subsequent quotations), read: "On the Way into the Dark Time." Nordlys welcomed Advent with Kjartan Berg's "Expectation During the Dark Time," an article carried in the November 26 issue. Berg noted the near convergence of Advent and morketida: "There is something peculiar about Advent. Only two days earlier the sun went under the horizon."

Morketida, like Advent, has both literal and symbolic meanings. It is a season of the year that becomes associated with ways of thinking and feeling. People respond differently to the darkness they see outside and often within themselves.

Some welcome morketida as a time for reading and reflection and as a season of beauty, particularly with the lights in the sky. In the dark days just before Christmas 1983, the snow clouds suddenly broke, revealing a moon so full and so constant that it recalled the midnight sun. Circling above the city from December 19 to December 22, the moon eased people through the winter solstice and toward the festivities of lillejulaften (little Christmas Eve, December 23).

During the same period, Venus dominated the eastern sky. In "Beauty in Advent," carried in the December 24 issue of Nordlys, Aksel Mikalsen described Venus as "a little sun" that made "streaks of yellow in the woods down the sides of the valley." His thoughts turned to biblical imagery and Christmas: "And in the eastern sky one can have a presentiment of the light, the eternal unchangeable light, which is on the way to us again." With the moon, the stars, and the northern lights (aurora borealis) flaring from pale green to a spectrum of colors, one can see why some welcome morketida. And one can readily understand how Nils Knutsen, teacher of Norwegian literature at the University of Tromso, can describe the season as "the exotic time."

While some see light during morketida, others focus primarily on the darkness. They associate the darkness with physical and emotional problems and look forward to the emergence of the sun in January, when most of their seasonal complaints vanish. Complaints vary from mild irritations to major incapacitating conditions.

The primary difficulty during morketida is insomnia, which is possibly related to hormonal imbalances caused by the long darkness. According to Trond Bratlid, one of a team of three conducting sleep research at the University of Tromso, about 25 percent of Tromso's residents suffer from this insomnia. The number includes more women than men, more young people than old. But all parts of the population are affected. Relevant comments, made in casual conversations and in formal interviews, include statements by mothers whose babies have no sense of day and night and complaints by married couples. The harmony may vanish from a marriage when one partner cannot get to sleep and the other cannot stay awake.

361 - Keep Your Lamps Burning: Advent in the Arctic

Morketida sleeplessness is often accompanied by depression and physical problems, as shown by the following statement from Magnus Larsen, seventy-two years old. The comment appeared in a special section published in the January 7, 1984, Nordlys:

You believe perhaps that this is an exaggeration, but each year I fear that the dark time shall take my life. I become depressed when the light during the day disappears and fog, rain, or snow-showers come down on the city. I have problems sleeping, and I also become rheumatic.

Area residents handle their insomnia and related problems in various ways. Some simply search elsewhere for the sun. Ten suntan centers and eight travel bureaus nourish in the city. Others try to find more meaningful solutions. Some of them see in the lights of Advent an answer to the surrounding darkness.

III

The 1983 Advent, like previous Advents in Tromso, was a great season of light. Candles, strategically placed in churches, homes, and schools, declared the beginning of the season. Against the backdrop of

362 - Keep Your Lamps Burning: Advent in the Arctic

morketida, they seemed especially warm, bright, and meaningful. Pastors were preoccupied with the imagery of light throughout Advent. I had never before heard, or perhaps noticed, so many sermons based on "Jesus as the light of the world. Caught up in the same theme, church music directors selected hymns filled with references to light and darkness. To a visitor from the United States, the season had a dramatic, even an exotic, setting.

At the start of Advent, Kjartan Berg interpreted the seasonal lights in his "Expectation During the Dark Time," cited earlier. He noted the setting for Advent-"a dark time: without sun"-and the people, those who could and those who could not see the season as a "sweet time of expectation." And he foretold the outcome, survival by cod liver oil, vitamins, and the Scriptures. Connection was drawn between the candles, the sun, and the Son. The Advent lights, he explained, mark the way to Christmas when ""the Sun is on the upswing again and that points towards lighter times.... For that something we await so is the light in a twofold sense."

The many Advent programs and concerts emphasized the light imagery. On the dark and snowy afternoon of December 3, I attended a concert of seasonal music at one parish and a Sunday school program at another of the Norwegian Lutheran Church. The concert was given by five children's choirs, two of which had especially intriguing names: Sol, meaning Sun, and Solglimt Glimpse of the Sun. The children of Sol wore sun colors, wide golden collars on maroon robes. During the Sunday school program, which was similar to many other local church programs, the pastor discussed Jesus as the light in a dark world, the children lit Advent candles, and both children and parents sang Advent hyms focusing on light and dark.

The most appropriate references to Advent hymns are perhaps those popular in north Norway but not so widely known outside Scandinavian countries. Two of the favorite selections, sung both at school and church, are "Now We Light Our Advent Wreath" and "Now We Light the First Candle." The initial verses of the first hymn represent the imagery of so many other Advent hymns:

Now we light our Advent wreath.
We are happy in the brilliance of the light.
It tells us that God has brought the light
that breaks the power of darkness.

Many elementary classes begin their school days in December by lighting Advent candles to the accompaniment of this hymn.

An Advent poem, "in the Middle of the Dark Time," written by Kari Nostdal and included in the December 17, 1983, Nordlys, notes the concurrence in time of Advent and morketida and describes the dominance of the lights. Right up until Christmas, businesses through out the city advertised their respective wares with accompanying illustrations of Advent candles.

363 - Keep Your Lamps Burning: Advent in the Arctic

The conclusion lies, however, in the Scriptures. The Gospel for the second Sunday in the 1983 Advent, which was December 4, and for Christmas Day, pulled together the imagery scattered throughout seasonal programs and services. The December 4 Gospel came from Luke 12:35-40. Verse 35 made particular sense in the context of morketida: "Keep your loins girded and your lamps burning."

The Christmas Gospel, John 1:1-14, completed the light and dark imagery of Advent. Verse 5 carries the heart of the message and proclaims that the waiting is over: "The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it." The imagery, which conveys the fulfillment of prophecy, is significant to Christians everywhere. It can have very special meaning in a land wrapped in a long night. To the faithful in Tromso and elsewhere above the Arctic Circle, the Christmas Gospel from John showed the way out of morketida.