A novel or a movie contains what are called arcs: stories within stories, if you like. Each character follows an individual arc, a story line within a story, as he or she reacts to the events that make up the plot.

A separate arc may trace a relationship between two of the characters, as in a love story. Still another arc follows the story’s main “problem.” It can be a mystery or perhaps a secret which the story uncovers or a moral choice or a resolution toward which the story works as it progresses.

Seldom are all the arcs revealed at the same time. One may influence the other, but each has its own life: beginning, middle, end. Characters never know all the arcs in the story that they inhabit.

I think of real life like that, too. Some process begins, perhaps known to only a few people, until it bursts on the scene, influencing millions. The awful tragedy in Connecticut was the culmination of arc lines from many stories, some of which we will never know. Some witnesses to the tragedy will change the paths they were intending to go and live different stories than they planned before the tragedy unfolded. We can choose to change our arcs.

We ponder the evil in the world, the innocents who suffer. Events tempt us to despair. Yet, we don’t know all the arcs in the story. Advent is a symbol of waiting, waiting for all arcs to end, finally, for the conquest of darkness with light. We wait with faith for the arc to play out that began with a baby born in Palestine two millennia ago.