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258 ˜ A Work of Hospitality, 1982–2002
and brothers, whose faces I hardly remember except when I have strange dreams
of my early childhood, sitting on my godfather J. Pinckney Davis’s knee, learning
how to read and sing a hymn like “Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel.”
“The opening chapters of the New Testament speak of many visits,” my dad
preached. “The angel Gabriel visits Mary. Mary visits Elizabeth. The angels visit
the shepherds. The shepherds visit the lowly child in the manger. Wise people
from the East visit Jerusalem and then Bethlehem and then the child. Mary and
Joseph visit the temple with the child. But the supreme visit, the greatest and
best visit of all these, is that this child, the Holy God, visits us sinners. The
Almighty God visits us creatures of the dust. And we know that this visit is really
far more than a mere visit; for Christ came not just to visit and then to leave
us. Christ came to abide, to come and live forever with us. The eternal Son of
God on Christmas Day becomes our brother and stays with us as our brother.”
On Christmas Day we remember that the Dayspring comes to visit us. The
word dayspring came into the English language from early translations of the
Bible. In the 1500s, dayspring was used for that point on the horizon at which
the sun rises. The sunrise is gradual. So seems our meeting with Jesus, our
Dayspring.
We do not and cannot always rejoice in, or even feel, the shining splendor
of the morning star. We often do not know that Jesus visits. “Every heart has a
bitter sadness all its own,” my dad said. How true! Those friends I sat with in
church a quarter of a century ago could not sit on the same beach with me in
Fort Lauderdale; they could not go into a restaurant with my mother.
“Every heart has a bitter sadness all its own.” Dayspring Farm became a part
of our community after a particularly sad time. By the time we began to celebrate
the Advent of Jesus—our Dayspring—in 1987 with our first retreat at
Dayspring Farm, five of our friends on death row had been killed; some enthusiastic
and hopeful members of the community had left in sadness and with a
sense of breakdown; and Hannah Loring-Davis had survived a very serious accident.
During Advent it didn’t seem that the Dayspring was about to dawn.
“Every heart has a bitter sadness all its own.” The Butler Street Breakfast is
full of sad hearts that belong to young Black men who have no work, no home,
no meaning in life. The prisons are full of sad hearts that know the emptiness of
days locked away from family and friends. Our war-crazed world is full of sad
hearts because the peace of the Dayspring is shattered by bombers.
“Every heart has a bitter sadness all its own,” my dad said, “and yet the bitter
sadness is not all our own. Christ, our Dayspring from on high, knows our
bitter sadness, and shares our burdens and problems. We need to be conscious
of Christ’s presence in our lives and ask for Christ’s support. Then we will find
relief. We all, therefore, have reason to rejoice with Zechariah in ‘the tender
mercy of God whereby the Dayspring from on high has visited us, to give light