Can We Have Some Light, please?

Seeing in darkness & celebrating December 13

This time of year can be challenging due to the long nights and short days and what feels like endless darkness. Many of us try to stem off this season’s anxiety with holiday lights. Lots and lots of lights. Twinkles framing our houses and trimming our trees. Strands and more strands circling every light post up and down our streets.

Celebrating this Friday might help. Celebrating Saint Lucia, the patron saint of eyes, sight, insight, and light.

If you’re familiar with St. Lucy, it’s likely you know her as having a ring of candles on her head. (don’t try this at home) This would be St. Lucy as she is celebrated in Sweden. Legend has it that she would bring food to those hiding in the catacombs to avoid persecution and she wore candles in a wreathe on her head so she could carry more food.

But as much as Scandinavia loves the Festival of St. Lucia, the Italians can rightly claim her as their own. Having born and died in Syracuse (the southeast tip of Sicily) in the 4^th Century CE, she is naturally the town’s patron saint.

As the story goes, a powerful man fell in love with Lucia because of her beautiful eyes but since he was not a Christian, she refused to marry him. Furious, he sent men to blind her. (Which, in turn, infuriates me.) But alas, her eyes were miraculously healed.

There is also a Syracusan legend of a famine ending on her feast day when unexpected ships arrived in their harbor loaded with grain. This is why she is often depicted holding some wheat. (This combination of legends makes me think of “a feast for the eyes”...)

It is in Dante’s Divine Comedy, however, where her symbolism and significance rise to new heights. Lucy appears early in this trilogy, first in Canto 2 of Inferno:

And it was she who called upon Lucia, requesting of her: “Now your faithful one has need of you, and I commend him to you.” Lucia, enemy of every cruelty, arose and made her way to where I [Beatrice] was…. Lines 97-101

It is Lucia, as an intermediary of illuminating grace, who urges Beatrice to send Virgil to Dante’s aid.

Then, in Purgatorio, Canto 9, lines 52–63, it is Lucia who carries a sleeping Dante to the entrance of purgatory.

I am Lucia; let me take hold of him who is asleep, that I may help to speed him on his way.

Lucia, who is the bearer of light in the darkness, carries Dante twice out of darkness, both the literal darkness as well as the metaphorical darkness, leading him towards salvation.

Seeing her depicted above in the colors of spring, still such a young maiden, I can’t help thinking of Persephone who descends into the darkness, into the underworld, to give comfort to the dead. With her blessing, the dead are calmed, their understanding complete. Is this not the same as bringing food to those in the catacombs, to carrying Dante out of darkness, to bringing light and insight, and hence comfort, to those who have lost their way? Lucy’s eyes, like the pomegranate seeds which Persephone ate, bind her to darkness, both this lack of outside light cannot keep either from seeing clearly. And both hold a shaft of wheat, symbolic of growth and life.

St. Lucia offers us all of this. She reminds us of the return of light to the world, a prelude of sorts to Solstice and then Christmas. In the midst of this cold, dark season, Lucia even echoes Spring and the resurrection of all things.

St. Lucia reminds us that we, too, can be bearers of light. We, too, will emerge from this darkness. And this, too, is comforting.

This Friday, December 13, I am donating my old glasses to Costco. Costco, in turn, shares them with Assist International who gives them to others in need. It’s a small gesture, of course, but appropriate for the day.

And when I get home, I will give thanks, light candles, and think of St. Lucia.

What about you?