It is like a man traveling abroad. He leaves home … and orders the gatekeeper to be on the watch. For me the image of the gatekeeper engages my imagination of the coming night watch – in an ancient city silhouetted against a setting sun as the lanterns and home lights cast their first shadows against the coming night.

Somewhere within its walls, an ancient and arthritic hand pushes against a wooden gate that slowly groans open. An elderly gatekeeper lights the watch lamp, hangs it upon a post and settles in – alone and alone with his thoughts. Such is the nature of the night watch.

It is not just of ancient times and places. Every eventide when most of us begin our glide path to sleep and dream of tomorrow, others keep watch – hold vigil as the dusk gives way to the gloaming then settles into the dark night. People alone and alone with their thoughts

• a deputy sheriff on night patrol, an police officer driving alongside a chain-link fence, checking the gate at the school yard, the vacant lot – all the in between places.
• a nurse making her midnight rounds. The glow of flashing numbers marking the pulse, the breathing, the life – all reflect in the lenses of her glasses. The sound of her steps quiet, but determined, as she moves from room to room, patient to patient.
• The midnight watch at sea – the silent sentinels standing post – eyes scanning the horizon for what comes in the dark
• Fire and Rescue, UPS flight crews, or a thousand other folks who keep the night watch
• Many night vigils are held right in your house. The house is quiet, the family asleep. The glare of a computer monitor; the only light as you view your bills online – the credit charges, cable service, car loan, mortgage payment, utilities – and Christmas coming soon. There is not enough, not this year.

Many things come in the night. It is in the silence of the night’s passing, between the moments – that the sorrows, the joys well up. When anxiety haunts us even as we count off the hours until night withers and sunrise prowls the horizon. There are nights when peace is as elusive and the night is long. The night watch is the time given us.

Advent is also the time given us – peace no less elusive, anxiety no less present. The people of our first reading knew that longing and waiting for the Messiah. They cry out with that full range of emotion: sorrow, joys, anxiety, fear they are too far lost to be found, cries that for God to come down and rend the heavens and make himself know, and haunted by the feeling that their guilt has left them up-rooted and scattered in the winds. Yet even in that long night, they recognize a core truth: that God continues to shape their lives: “Yet, O LORD… we are the clay and you the potter: we are all the work of your hands.” At the end of it all, this is what they hold onto in the time given them.

We are the gatekeepers of our time, keeping watch for the One-who-is-to-Come. And like the Israelites, to recognize the one central truth of their waiting. In this long vigil, waiting to open the gates for the Christ child, we hold onto the truth that we are never alone. God is ever present even in the watches of the night (maybe especially so).

• Think of Joseph in the dead of night, adjusting the packs on the donkey, preparing to flee to Egypt with Mary and her child. Surely, he felt alone, but he had already opened his gates to the word of the Lord coming to him in a dream. He was not alone.
• Think of Mary Magdalene, her soul as empty and dark as the gaping entrance to an empty tomb. She was alone, but searching – she was found and not alone.
• Think of St Paul, shackled to the stone wall of a prison: deserted by friends, heckled by guards, alone in his cell. Yet, not alone.
• A nurse who encounters the Lord of life in the midst of patients receiving palliative care
• A parent encounters the Lord of love at the bedside of a sick child during the night
• In the heart of a submariner, night watch allows enough silence to hear that still small voice of the Lord of hope.

None alone, each with the time given to us – time to let the potter shape us – time to celebrate the One-to-come who is ever present.

And so…it is the time for the night watch – our city silhouetted against a setting sun as the streetlights, headlights and home lights cast their first shadows against the coming night. We open the gates of our lives in prayer, we light our Advent candles, we settle in for the long night, secure that we are never alone – and we pray:

O LORD… we are the clay and you the potter: we are all the work of your hands. 

Amen

Image credit: Pexels | Photo by Johannes Plenio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/red-and-white-lighthouse-1105382/