It has been awhile since I’ve posted but I wanted to share a reflection from someone I read regularly with my own additions. Here’s Glen Scrivener: He shines in the dark
I understand this well. This past year I’ve suffered multiple crippling injuries (including a broken hand, hence the lack of writing), shared the crushing depression of friends and mother, struggled with my own inner darkness, and lost a father. It seems like death always has the last word. 
Not only physical death, but mental death and spiritual death. The physical is only the final touch to what this fallen world wrought upon men. Broken relationships, verbal abuse, crushed souls. All of these are not only par for the course, but things I’ve contributed to. I don’t feel tears, but numbness. The inner wounds scar my soul, and I grow cold.
I find myself feeling as if I’m choking in prayer. I don’t know what to say but ‘Help!’. But those are my better moments.
The virus within is the overbearing lie of pride. I disbelieve the Gospel, yet my eyes are opened past the naivete of days gone by. I see the approaching death, and like a madman I try and outrun the dusk. I think that I can fight and escape such fate. At least for a little while. I tend to have 3 different themes when I get dreams, all of them I hate. One of them is running. I’ll have these physically, emotionally, mentally draining dreams of me trying to escape. Sometimes I’ll be running from some unnatural creature. Sometimes it will be from mere men who want me dead. Other times it will be from my own mortality. Trying to run past the clock. Yet I wake up knowing that I too shall die.
Yet in my pride, I keep on raging, thinking that my pathetic roar will scare off the reaper one more day. I keep running, looking inward, fulfilling the corrupted nature of incurvatus se. But my King is faithful where I am not, and calls me through His Spirit once again. I come choking out prayers on bended knee, and returning to my Heavenly Friend, my Crucified God, my Resurrected Lord, forever blessed amen.
While I am no adherent of the Latin liturgical calendar, I recognize that this is a season where many siblings contemplate and meditate on the Incarnation. Here, in the impossibility of this world of shit and death, we have the Light born into darkness. We find the cradle born under the shadow of the cross. The ultimate evil, nevertheless, the even more final redemption. Here came God-in-Flesh to save rebels and wretches, both of whom were doomed to death.
So this winter, where the idolatry of family can rear its head and crush those who lack, the Light truly does shine in the dark. We don’t need to be like me, always trying to outrun the sunset. No, our Master faced our destiny and turned it inside out. Jesus turned the dusk into dawn, death into resurrection. We live in the Night, but are sanctified for the coming Morning. Let us follow the Light, our Candle illuminating the shadows.
Post Tenebras, Spero Lucem
Amen.