In her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes of a girl, blind from birth, who gains sight after an operation. She is shown a tree for the first time. Astonished, she calls it “the tree with the lights in it.” Dillard writes that she herself spent years searching for the tree with the lights in it, desiring the awe the girl experienced. One day, out of the blue, Dillard sees it. “I had my whole life been a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck,” she writes. I want that awe, too, but my attention is usually too diffuse to notice opportunities for it.  

Both of today’s readings, Isaiah’s poetry and Matthew’s story of the healing Jesus, include blindness giving way to sight. The inbreaking of light into darkness is a big Advent theme in these short days here in the Northern Hemisphere. T he birth of Christ, the Light of the World, invites us to see in a new way. And what does it mean to see the world lit by the light of Christ? Perhaps it includes cultivating the sort of wonder Dillard found in the girl born blind.  

God, who came to the manger out of unimaginable love for the planet and all of us on it, delights in creation. To share in that delight, to take a grateful breath of the bracing winter air or to see the tree with the lights in it—or even to slow ourselves down because we desperately want to see the tree with the lights in it—is one of the most sacred things we can do.