I found this piece when researching a homily - it spoke very strongly to me so I wanted to share it.
In Praise of Darkness
Barbara Brown Taylor
Christianity has never had anything nice to say about the dark.
“Darkness” is shorthand for anything that scares me — that I want no
part of — either because I am sure that I do not have the resources to
survive it or because I do not want to find out. The absence of God is in
there, along with the fear of dementia and the loss of those nearest and
dearest to me. So is the melting of polar ice caps, the suffering of
children, and the nagging question of what it will feel like to die. If I had
my way, I would eliminate everything from chronic back pain to the fear
of the devil from my life and the lives of those I love — if I could just find
the right night-lights to leave on.
At least I think I would. The problem is this: when, despite all my best
efforts, the lights have gone off in my life (literally or figuratively, take
your pick), plunging me into the kind of darkness that turns my knees to
water, nonetheless I have not died. The monsters have not dragged me
out of bed and taken me back to their lair. The witches have not turned
me into a bat. Instead, I have learned things in the dark that I could
never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and
over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need
darkness as much as I need light.
The problem is that there are so few people who can teach me about that.
Most of the books on the New York Times “How-To” bestseller list are
about how to avoid various kinds of darkness. If you want to learn how to
be happy and stay that way, how to win out over your adversaries at
work, or how to avoid aging by eating the right foods, there is a book for
you. If you are not a reader, you can always find someone on the radio,
the television, or the web who will tell you about the latest strategy for
staying out of your dark places, or at least distract you from them for a
while. Most of us own so many electronic gadgets that there is always a
light box within reach when any kind of darkness begins to descend on
us. Why watch the sun go down when you could watch the news instead?
Why lie awake at night when a couple of rounds of Moonlight Mahjong
could put you back to sleep?
I wish I could turn to the church for help, but so many congregations are
preoccupied with keeping the lights on right now that the last thing they
want to talk about is how to befriend the dark. Plus, Christianity has
never had anything nice to say about darkness. From earliest times,
Christians have used “darkness” as a synonym for sin, ignorance,
spiritual blindness, and death. Visit almost any church and you can still
hear it used that way today: Deliver us, O Lord, from the powers of
darkness. Shine into our hearts the brightness of your Holy Spirit, and
protect us from all perils and dangers of the night.
Since I live on a farm where the lights can go out for days at a time, this
language works at a practical level. When it is twenty degrees outside at
midnight and tree branches heavy with ice are crashing to the ground
around your house, it makes all kinds of sense to pray for protection
from the dangers of the night. When coyotes show up in the yard after
dark, eyeing your crippled old retriever as potential fast food, the perils
of the night are more than theoretical. So I can understand how people
who lived before the advent of electricity — who sometimes spent
fourteen hours in the dark without the benefit of so much as a flashlight
— might have become sensitive to the powers of darkness, asking God for
deliverance in the form of bright morning light.
At the theological level, however, this language creates all sorts of
problems. It divides every day in two, pitting the light part against the
dark part. It tucks all the sinister stuff into the dark part, identifying God
with the sunny part and leaving you to deal with the rest on your own
time. It implies things about dark-skinned people and sight-impaired
people that are not true. Worst of all, it offers people of faith a giant
closet in which they can store everything that threatens or frightens them
without thinking too much about those things. It rewards them for their
unconsciousness, offering spiritual justification for turning away from
those things, for “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all” (1
John 1:5).
To embrace that teaching and others like it at face value can result in a
kind of spirituality that deals with darkness by denying its existence or at
least depriving it of any meaningful attention. I call it “full solar
spirituality,” since it focuses on staying in the light of God around the
clock, both absorbing and reflecting the sunny side of faith. You can
usually recognize a full solar church by its emphasis on the benefits of
faith, which include a sure sense of God’s presence, certainty of belief,
divine guidance in all things, and reliable answers to prayer. Members
strive to be positive in attitude, firm in conviction, helpful in
relationship, and unwavering in faith. This sounds like heaven on earth.
Who would not like to dwell in God’s light 24/7?
If you have ever belonged to such a community, however, you may have
discovered that the trouble starts when darkness falls on your life, which
can happen in any number of unsurprising ways: you lose your job, your
marriage falls apart, your child acts out in some attention-getting way,
you pray hard for something that does not happen, you begin to doubt
some of the things you have been taught about what the Bible says. The
first time you speak of these things in a full solar church, you can usually
get a hearing. Continue to speak of them and you may be reminded that
God will not let you be tested beyond your strength. All that is required
of you is to have faith. If you still do not get the message, sooner or later
it will be made explicit for you: the darkness is your own fault, because
you do not have enough faith.
Having been on the receiving end of this verdict more than once, I do not
think it is as mean as it sounds. The people who said it seemed genuinely
to care about me. They had honestly offered me the best they had. Since
their sunny spirituality had not given them many skills for operating in
the dark, I had simply exhausted their resources. They could not enter
the dark without putting their own faith at risk, so they did the best they
could. They stood where I could still hear them and begged me to come
back into the light.
If I could have, I would have. There are days when I would give anything
to share their vision of the world and their ability to navigate it safely,
but my spiritual gifts do not seem to include the gift of solar spirituality.
Instead, I have been given the gift of lunar spirituality, in which the
divine light available to me waxes and wanes with the season. When I go
out on my porch at night, the moon never looks the same way twice.
Some nights it is as round and bright as a headlight; other nights it is
thinner than the sickle hanging in my garage. Some nights it is high in
the sky, and other nights low over the mountains. Some nights it is
altogether gone, leaving a vast web of stars that are brighter in its
absence. All in all, the moon is a truer mirror for my soul than the sun
that looks the same way every day.
Barbara Brown Taylor is the author of “Learning to Walk in the Dark”
(HarperOne), from which this piece is excerpted.
"I form the light, and cr... more