“And when he rode past, I seen he was carrying fire in a horn the way people used to do, and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was going on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire in all that dark and all that cold…”
The quotation above is from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, in which a young everyman finds himself caught up in a drug deal gone horribly wrong. Because millions of dollars are at stake the scenario turns violent, and the darkness seems to reach into every corner of the story touching the lives of every character. The novel is a work of fiction, but the truth of the matter vis a vis the illegal drug trade is all too real. It is a dark violence affecting the entire world community.The slaughter continues along the American Mexican border on a scale never seen before. The old half-retired sheriff is one of the few characters in the novel who stays alive….and at the end of the novel he tells his wife about a dream he had the night before. (above)
In the dream he his high up upon a snowy mountain pass and he sees his father, now dead, and a former sheriff of the same county, ride past carrying a fire in a horn presumably to enable lighting the next camp fire along the way. A fine metaphor I think for the life of faith. I am sure great care would have to be taken to protect this light, this light that will preserve life. In a mountain pass the wind changes direction often and the flame would at times gutter against it, be sorely challenged by it. The custodian of the flame must pay rapt attention lest the one rogue gust extinguish it.
We are in the season of Epiphany in the church, the season of light, the season of revelation….We are the caretakers of this tenuous light. Lane Densen blogger extraordinaire says that Christmas like the circus comes all of a sudden into town and then gets the heck out….and what is left is a pale and fragile flame in the wind in a dark time of the year, a light that bears all truth, a light to which we must tend as if our lives depended on it, and the lives of others….because such is the truth of the matter….This light is the light of our true humanity, modeled by the life and ministry of Jesus….the light of mercy and compassion…of hospitality and embrace….of non-violence and forgiveness and living together justly…a light though frail, but powerful enough to transform our world.
Take courage travelers….live the dream that the light persists…persists because love persists…bear the flame with all due care, the flame golden as the moon, beauty of the beginning, our sacred inheritance…bear it with loving care, pay attention to the capricious wind, for this meagre light is more than vital for us to fix out there in all that dark and all that cold.
