Tony Woodlief | Author

The Cave of the Heart

Here’s an excerpt from my Christmas Eve post over at Good Letters:

When I read about the boy hiding under his bed, first inviting the world he knew to watch him die, then hiding from it in that darkened place, I thought about the cave where a savior was born. I thought as well about the cave within my own heart, the cave crafted to be filled just as surely as a bucket or a cup or an upturned palm awaits what may fill it.

We all bear this waiting space, and it will be filled, it will be filled. The emptied and darkened places of creation are invitations, and who knows what may enter them, what crawls or slithers into them in the nighttime of the soul, from depth to depth, from dark to dark?

Who knows as well what this boy carried in his heart, what weighted it down, what made his life a dreadful burden to be sloughed off? Absence can be the weightiest of all the heart’s burdens. The cave is in us but we are also in it, as anyone who has ever suffered from deep despair can attest. The hole within threatens to swallow you up.

You can read the rest here. And may the light find you this Christmas as well.

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