Saturday, April 2, 2011

I will give you the treasures of darkness ( Isaiah 45:3)

When I lived in Kingsport, TN, I had a beautiful in-ground pool. One of my favorite things to do, late at night, despite my friend, Sarah’s insistent warnings that I should not swim alone, was to turn off all the lights in my house, and all the pool lights,  climb into the pool and float around, in the warm water,  on my back in the dark.   I imagined that I was actually floating in the sky – in the heavens – and looking down at the earth – and that the lights of the stars were the lights of the homes on the earth. I loved this sensation of being weightless in the dark, like an embryo, floating in her mother’s womb.
I loved this experience of disembodied, anonymous, one with the universe,  darkness.

Many people are afraid of the dark, not just the dark of wilderness, for example, but plain old every day (or every night, more correctly), dark...with good reason. Unlike some of God’s other creatures, we’ve lost our instinctive night vision. We are creatures very dependent on light, especially, in our modern world, on light made by our own hands, i.e., artificial light.

In the dark, we become disoriented, vulnerable. We lose the impression of control and clarity that we have when things are brightly illuminated. In our world, especially in Atlanta, thieves, muggers, and rapists, claim the darkness as their own: they require its cover for the element of surprise. The darkness and the fear that it engenders are essential to empower their sinister deeds.

Darkness and dark things suggest something negative, both in our culture and in our spiritual history.

Several years ago, the movie, the Lion King, was criticized as being racist – because it depicted evil only through characters of dark skin or countenance.  Perhaps this was the case.  But we understood, didn’t we – in American culture today for good or for ill, dark can often mean bad, evil, dangerous.

We often use metaphors of darkness to describe times of great trial, or times of intense suffering or confusion.  We languish in the dark, with chronic illness; we stumble in the dark, when we’re in trouble or have lost our way. When things are hopeless, it’s like whistling in the dark – we have no idea where or if the sound will carry.

The Scriptures often use the image of darkness in the same way,  to connote despair, loss, bewilderment, trouble and abandonment.

God’s first act is to dispel chaos and darkness with a word: “let there be light.”  The people who are waiting for the Messiah, are people who have sat in darkness for a very longtime.

We remember the famous story of Nicodemus, who comes to Jesus under cover of darkness –  a midnight caller, in secret.  He leaves, unfortunately, as much in the dark as he came.

And at the third hour, when Jesus dies on the cross, darkness covers the earth –a phenomenon in reality, but also a metaphorical statement that in that darkest hour,
creation has returned to that original state of being a lightless, chaotic void.

Mystics, like John of the Cross, reflect this tendency to see darkness as absence, emptiness, dryness: times of great spiritual trial, loneliness, anxiety or hopelessness
are called “dark nights of the soul.”  We see, says St. Paul, in our current, immature state of spirituality, as if we are looking through a glass, darkly.  When we become spiritually mature, when we are finally united with Christ, only then can we become what we aspire to live as: children of light.

But I want to suggest that the darkness can also be a gift; that darkness can present an opportunity… an opportunity for encounter, for a deepening of knowledge, understanding and love – for ourselves and for God.

Rev. Gene Paradise said once, in a sermon, something that has struck and remained with me: that Jesus, the light of the world, did not come to eliminate the darkness, but to illumine it, to elp us see what needs to be seen in the darkness. 

And what needs to be seen in the darkness is less frightening, I suggest, than good.

We begin our lives, after all, in the dark – in the warm, unlit cavern of our mothers’ wombs.  Many of us, most of us, maybe, I would guess, were actually conceived in the dark. The night, despite its terrors, is also a time for making love.

Our first moments of life are terribly disturbing – as we leave that dark, lovely, quiet and protected place, faced with that first blast of stark, cold, hospital room light.  If the doctor didn’t slap us, my guess is that we would cry out anyway in distress, in our newborn language:  “back to the warm, dark place, please!”  Now, in deference to the benefits of darkness, many birthing rooms are only half lit at the moment of arrival so that the newborn can gradually acclimate to the light of his or her new world.

Darkness can provide opportunity. 

The darkness brought blessed relief to the Israelites, wandering day by day in the crushing heat and light  of their desert wilderness.  It was around campfires in the dark coolness of the evening shade that they could find the breath and energy to tell and re-tell he great stories of God’s loving and steadfast kindness, the story of their and our salvation history.

Nicodemus had only enough courage to make his way to Jesus with the protection of nightfall – the darkness enabled him to find a place of encounter he could bear, with the living God.

The Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, describes that opportunity like this:

You, darkness of whom I am born—

I love you more than the flame
that limits the world
and excludes all the rest.

But the dark embraces everything:
shapes and shadows, creatures and me,
people, nations –  just as they are.

It lets me imagine
a great presence stirring beside me.

I believe in the night.
                            Rilke’s Book of Hours, I,II, p. 63  tr. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

The darkness creates a space for something in its forgiving absence of the cold, hard light of day. After all, the darkness is the time when we can lay down and rest, “to sleep and perchance, to dream” as Shakespeare says.  Dreams, conveying God’s unspoken language, are spoken in the darkness of deepest sleep, and are pathways that open to God …when sleep enables us to set aside the defensive protectiveness of ego and the defensiveness of consciousness.

The darkness, without the intrusion of artificial light, forces us to slow our activity, and be quiet.  Is there a quieter time in this city or in our lives than when we have a power outage?

Perhaps the darkness enables us to see things that otherwise we might miss.  A paradox: darkness clarifies what can get obscured by the light of day.

When I was in Africa in 2008, I was coming home one night, after a lovely dinner with the dean of the theological school and his family. David, their oldest, age 13, accompanied me to my guest quarters on another part of the campus.  As we walked, we looked up at the sky – and saw a million stars.   I mentioned to David that in Atlanta, where I lived, sometimes you couldn’t see the stars, because of the intense and magnified lights of the city.  David was silent with the characteristics courtesy of Africans, especially, African children.  But I could tell what he was thinking: “why would anyone live in a place where you could not see the stars?”

Without the darkness, we would be unable to see either the moon or the stars.

Barbara Brown Taylor tells a story in her book the Altar of the World (p.53ff).

She and her husband, Ed, decided to take a walk in the dark one evening around a lake on a path well known to them.  They turned off their flashlights and attempted to find their way in the dark, relying only on their past knowledge, and each other.

Ed and Barbara discovered something important in the dark: the significance of paying close attention, of listening, of relying on each other; relying on their innate ability to align themselves in space, to each other and to the earth.  Using only their memory, intuition, insight, and their connectedness and love for each other, they found their way intuitively in the darkness.  They re-discovered what we all have, our close connection to the earth and our own created nature. In the dark, we can rediscover our fundamental goodness and creatureliness – our connection with everything created.

Perhaps that’s why the Spirit drove Jesus immediately into the actual and spiritual darkness of the desert wilderness after his baptism at the hands of John.  To remind him of who he was, of his dependence on his Creator, of his intimate oneness with all of created life – and of God’s great love for all that God created – despite the fact that God’s creation is fallen and broken, like things that go bump in the night.


Through the mouth of the prophet, Isaiah, the Lord says:

I will give you the treasures of darkness, and riches hidden in secret places, so that you may know that it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who calls you by your name.

There are treasures in the darkness and riches hidden in secret places when the lights go out.  The darkness can be a place to look for, to find and to encounter the living God and hear, that even in dark places, God calls us by name.

Go into the dark!

To know the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
Wendell Berry, The Selected Poems, p. 68.

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