Blessing the darkness

Light is one of the most pervasive and important symbols in Judaism and Christianity. The first book of the Bible, Genesis, describes the first act of creation with these words: “Let there be light, and there was light. God saw that the light was good.”

Jul 05, 2014

By Daniel S. Mulhall
Light is one of the most pervasive and important symbols in Judaism and Christianity. The first book of the Bible, Genesis, describes the first act of creation with these words: “Let there be light, and there was light. God saw that the light was good.”

Then God separated the light from the darkness, and all of creation follows from that moment. In the New Testament we find this statement in 1 John 1:5: “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.” Jesus calls himself the “light of the world” or a “light” three times in the Gospel according to John.

Light, which is an expression of energy, is essential to life. Sunlight warms the earth and encourages plants to create oxygen through photosynthesis. Light makes sight possible. Light also serves as a metaphor that connotes understanding. When we say that “the light went on,” we mean that we went from ignorance to comprehension, from darkness into light.

Recognizing the importance of light to life, however, should not in any way diminish the value of darkness. Just as we need light to grow, we need darkness in order to rest. Our bodies, including our minds, cannot run continuously. They need down time.

At night when we sleep, our bodies have a chance to recuperate, to clean toxins from our muscles and clutter from our brains, so that when we awake at dawn we are refreshed and ready to face the new day.

Interestingly, our brains never stop working, even when the rest of the body sleeps. Instead, while the body sleeps, the brain uses that relative down time to think through complex issues, helping us to resolve problems.

Barbara Brown Taylor, author of the book “Learning to Walk in the Dark,” recognizes the importance of darkness to human wellness and wholeness. In a recent radio interview, Taylor noted that humans everywhere fear the dark, whether that darkness comes about because of night or because of emotional or psychological doubt.

She stated that in order to overcome the fear of darkness, we must learn to embrace it, recognizing the gift that darkness can be for us. She said, “Darkness is anything that scares me. The absence of God is in there, dementia, and the loss of anyone near and dear to me.”

Taylor realized she needed darkness as much as she needed light during one of her darkest periods. It was in that darkness that she came to feel God’s presence in a special way. She came to understand that there was a spiritual richness in darkness. She realized that darkness did not mean the absence of God.

In rereading the first creation story in Genesis she saw that when light was created, while God recognized that it was good, nowhere in that passage is there any suggestion that darkness is bad or evil. This was her first major step toward a nascent spirituality of darkness.

Looking into the works from the Catholic mystical tradition, she came to realize that they used the language of darkness to express their relationship with God. The most prominent of those was the Carmelite, St. John of the Cross, who wrote the poem “Dark Night of the Soul” in 1578, and a commentary on the poem using the same name, published in 1584.

For St. John, the dark night of the soul expresses the struggle we have in separating ourselves from the things of this world in order to find union with Christ. Taylor argues that this dark night does not indicate a separation from or absence of God in our lives. Rather, as sleep rejuvenates the body and mind, being able to simply “dwell in darkness, content to be with God” does the same for our spirit, our souls.

During that darkness we are not actively searching for anything. We are simply being in the presence of God. From that darkness, like seeds buried in the earth then sprouted, we return as new people in faith.

What might it take to develop a spirituality of darkness? The first step, it seems, is to change our understanding, as Taylor suggests, recognizing that darkness is a necessary and essential part of our physical and spiritual lives. A key part of that change is to see darkness as a time of healing and nurturing, not a time of fear and trepidation, of loneliness and loss.

A second step requires us to see that God is actively present in the dark. This starts with accepting the fundamental Christian belief that God is everywhere: There is nowhere in all of creation where God is not present. Just as our eyes adjust in darkness to see, so our souls open wide in darkness to see God present there.
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A third step would be learning to pray in darkness. This prayer would necessarily need to be less doing and more receiving; less dependent upon my acting and more dependent on letting God be God, and just drinking it all in.

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