“Treasures of Darkness” illustration by Gary Gaede
Advent Day 9 – Monday, December 10
One of my earliest memories as a kid was seeing Bishop Fulton J. Sheen on television.
Clad in his bishop garb, he looked straight into the camera with his piercing dark eyes. His silver hair and perfect posture gave him an authoritative air, and, if you turned down the sound and were left with just the bishop’s image on the gray, grainy ’50s TV screen, he came across as imposing.
But he could be funny. I remember him cracking some laugh lines on his show, “Life is Worth Living,” which was on the air from 1952 to 1957.
And there was the profound: “You must remember to love people and use things rather than to love things and use people.”
Some lines made you think: “Ever since the days of Adam, man has been hiding from God and saying, ‘God is hard to find!’”
But one Sheenism that has always stood out to me was, “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.”
And similarly, “All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.”
As we enter the dark season of Advent, we are comforted by the hope—no, by the guarantee—that God’s one candle, Jesus Christ, the Light of the world, drives out darkness. That one candle, lit so many years ago, burns brightly today with lumens that measure into infinity.
May that holy light illumine your path and make your seasons bright.
—Denny Gale