My Own Hanukkah

The day was dull and gray, and my soul was sore and tired. What used to be home wasn’t home anymore, only an icy, unfriendly place where I lived, or almost lived. I looked around this room that used to feel cozy and comfortable, and I longed for that feeling, but there was only the cold. Life was bad, the world was bad, not like before.

There on the TV there was a candle. Maybe if I lit it, it would make things just a little bit better, though I could doubt it. I walked over and lit it, then sat back down, the voices around me like things far away and irrelevant.

It wasn’t a very good candle; I had made it myself. The wick was too thin for the candle width, and I watched the flame, so small and weak that it glowed blue and not yellow. “That’s like me,” I thought. “Just barely burning, just barely holding on, barely alive.” The flame became strangely and strongly symbolic of me, and I watched in horrified anticipation for it to go out. But it didn’t.

The ancient words played in my mind: You, O Lord, keep my lamp burning. I kept glancing over at the flame as time passed, and there it was, little and blue, but still there. Gloom crowded my mind. “Well, it will have to go out sometime.” But the last time I looked, it still burned.

The next morning I came into the kitchen and was surprised to see someone had put a large, hardened puddle of brown wax on the counter. Brown, like the candle. A strange hope flickered in my heart. “Mom, what is this?” I asked. “It was the candle from last night,” she said. “We forgot to blow it out. It burned all night.”

I believed the story of Hanukkah, how once in the land of Israel, after war and slaughter and desecration, the people of the land had once again consecrated the temple, and lit the eternal light that had been put out though it was supposed to burn forever; how they only had enough oil for it to burn for one night, but how it kept on burning for eight nights.

Perhaps, though, to believe a story is not just to believe that it actually happened, but to believe that it can happen again, here, now, because God is still God.

A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out. In faithfulness he will bring forth justice. Isaiah 42:3