It’s raining this afternoon, making for a rather gloomy day. Yet, I am grateful for the rain. Not having experienced extended droughts before the last few years, I have become very grateful for rain and darker days, which are so critical for replenishing our streams, lakes, wells, and soil.
Just having finished Barbara Brown Taylor’s book Learning to Walk in the Dark, I am more appreciative of darkness and gloominess, for as she points out, these tend to be times of introspection and doing nothing. Her quiet insistence that we can’t expect to live in the light all of the time spoke to something deep inside of me. That has been especially true for me in regard to my spiritual journey. Chapter after chapter, she describes her exploration of darkness and the many ways she taught herself not to be afraid of the dark, but instead to actually welcome it. After all, she observes, we have been programmed to fear the dark, and as a result, we fear all of those things that go bump in the night, thus never allowing ourselves to encounter the divine, which most often reveals itself in the dark, not in the light. In fact, she points out that the greatest mysteries surrounding Jesus are that he was born in a dark cave, hid in a cave in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights, and was resurrected in the darkness of a sealed cave.
One of the statistics she quotes is how lighting our cities and streets and homes has not really made us safer. In fact, once Chicago added street lights, crime increased. Perhaps because criminals could see what they were doing? And, let’s remember that before the last one hundred years, everyone went to bed in total darkness. No night lights or street lights or alarm clocks illuminating the darkness
She finds it interesting that even Scripture contrasts light as good and the dark as evil. Ironically, she suggests, this teaches us that when we feel lost and adrift, we assume that there is something wrong with us, rather than life or God is leading us in the path of introspection, in re-examining what we believe, in re-evaluating what faith means in our lives. In the same way as we try to discover some sort of light to guide us and make us feel safe in the dark, we think that questions and doubts are somehow evil. Rather than welcoming those “dark” times in our lives when we feel most lost, when the very things we thought were safe and constant seem to go up in a puff of smoke, we find ourselves stumbling in a kind of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual darkness. Yet, she insists, these are the times when we are most apt to encounter the divine, because those are the times when we are no longer trying to control and define our relationship with “God”. In spite of everything we have been told about light being good and darkness being bad, light tends to lead to complacency while darkness defines our times of greatest growth. Rarely are we forewarned of this, so when we find ourselves losing the faith of our earlier years, we think there is something wrong with us, rather than recognizing something positive that is helping us become more caring, more accepting, more loving, more self-accepting, more open.\
I have been watching a series of documentaries about our history, and it has struck me that it has been those periods when those in leadership are motivated by self-interest that this nation has undergone its darkest days…involving the genocide of the Native American peoples, slavery, periods of great financial inequality. Those periods when we think we are operating in the light are actually the darker periods of our history, and it is when we are stumbling along in the dark, desperate for hope, that some leader appears who is willing to experiment with new ideas and approaches, resulting in new bursts of freedom for the many, not just the few.
And yet, it is all too human that just as we cling to what seems familiar and safe, it seems to dissipate before our eyes, such as what we are experiencing today. Those steps forward when we made advances in civil rights, women’s rights, and workers’ rights, when we elected a black man as our president, those who had held more power felt threatened and created a great backlash, projecting us into a new era of darkness as a democratic country.
It is easy to be pessimistic about what lies ahead, yet I am confident that no matter what we humans do, there will always be a power far beyond our human understanding that is guiding the unfolding of the universe and has set into motion spiritual and physical laws guaranteeing that even when life as we know it is long dead and gone, something new, something unexpected, something wonderful will emerge to glorify our creator.