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Treasures of Darkness
Finding God When Hope Is Hidden
By Tara Soughers Abingdon Press
Copyright © 2009 Abingdon Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-3177-8
CHAPTER 1
Darkness Is as Light to You
(Psalm 139:7-12)
Even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you. —Psalm 139:12
We were deep underground. The cave tour had been interesting, and at times breathtakingly beautiful, but it was soon to become disorienting. We were gathered together in the middle of an incredible open space. The ceiling of the chamber stretched far overhead, and the walls were almost out of sight. It was hard to believe that we were actually underground. That is, until they turned off the lights. The darkness didn't come as a surprise. The guides had warned us in advance what was going to happen. For our safety, they cautioned us not to move about in the dark, and they promised us that they would not leave the lights off for very long.
I don't normally have a great fear of the dark but I had never encountered darkness like this before. Once the lights went off, there was absolutely no light. There were no shadows, no areas of deeper or lighter black. There were no faint outlines, and no matter how much I strained my eyes, I could see absolutely nothing. It was as if I had been swallowed by the darkness. With nothing to touch, nothing to hold onto, I felt as if I were teetering on the edge of a cliff. I could almost imagine that I was in freefall, even though my feet were firmly planted on the rock beneath me. I don't know how long they left us in darkness but I suspect that it wasn't very long. When the lights came back on, the whole group began chattering. The relief at being able to see was intense.
Complete darkness is rare. In these days of security lights, flashlights, streetlights, and car headlights, darkness has almost been banished. Few of us experience the darkness that makes it possible to study the stars or to see the Milky Way on a regular basis. Most of the time, we can ignore the dark, yet many of us have a deep-seated fear of the darkness, a fear that has been mitigated, but not banished, by our ever-present electric lights. True darkness has become unfamiliar to us, and perhaps because of that it is all the more frightening.
Darkness, however, doesn't have to be so terrifying. In fact, darkness often brings great gifts. In our own lives, darkness brings needed rest and relaxation. Intervals of light and darkness are necessary for plants to germinate. In hot, desert areas, darkness brings a welcome and needed break from the heat of the day.
Even if darkness is unfamiliar to us now, it was a common experience to our ancestors in the faith. Before the era of electric lights, they would have known the darkness that we almost never experience. They would have had an intimate knowledge of this strange and intimidating experience.
And that experience with darkness is reflected in the stories that are recorded in the Bible. Darkness is a common theme, and unlike stories now, in which darkness is almost always sinister or even evil, for our ancestors in the faith darkness was many-faceted. Yes, darkness could be associated with death and evil; but darkness was also the place of promise and enlightenment. Out of darkness came creation, and out of darkness we are reborn. Even more astonishing, darkness could be the place of our encounter with God.
But even when darkness does not always bring evil and suffering, it can be profoundly disturbing. In times past, eclipses were often thought to be signs of God's wrath or of the imminent end of the world. Even today, despite our understanding of the way in which an eclipse can occur, such a darkening of the sun can trigger a profound sense of disease. The closest that I have come to experiencing a total eclipse was in 1984 in Houston. It never got completely dark there, but even though I could still easily see, I became profoundly uneasy as the eclipse progressed. The bright blue sky got darker but still remained blue. The sun still shone in the cloudless sky but its intensity diminished. Everything looked odd, and the effect was unsettling. I could understand how ancient people who had no way of understanding what was happening might very well have thought that the world was ending or at least radically changing.
If the stories in the Bible that feature darkness have a common theme, it is that of change and transformation. Darkness is the time to confront those things that we may not wish to confront. The darkness is the time to see what we have been unable to see while blinded by the light. The darkness is the time of endings and beginnings.
So it has been for me. Some of the most important moments of my spiritual life have occurred in times of great darkness. In the darkness, I have been reborn. In darkness, I have struggled. In darkness, I have been enlightened. In darkness, I have encountered God.
Although there is much in me that still tries to avoid times of darkness, I cannot. For if I am journeying toward the One who made both light and darkness, I need to embrace both the light and the dark. As Psalm 139:712 affirms, darkness cannot hide me from the One who made it and who made me.
Perhaps the most common feeling in the various experiences that we collectively call "times of darkness" is a sense of the absence of God. In our times of darkness it can be hard to believe that God is really present. Sometimes it is the sense of God's absence that precipitates the darkness, and at other times we only notice God's absence once we are in the darkness.
In darkness, we cannot see. For those of us who have full use of our eyes, not seeing is hardly to be imagined. Even more than our ears, our eyes are the sense that we use most to explore and make sense of our world. It is difficult for most of us to describe things or people without saying what they look like.
In Madeleine L'Engle's novel A Wrinkle in Time, the main characters are transported to a planet where the inhabitants have no eyes. The concept of sight is beyond their imagining. Meg, Calvin, and Mr. Murray all do their best to describe sight but it is an impossible task. When they try to describe the three beings who had helped them, they find that they cannot really do so, except by using sight images that meant nothing to the inhabitants of Ixchel. What Meg recalls about Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. What sit is the clothing that they wore, the way that they appeared. She could not separate who they were from how they looked.
And maybe that is one reason that darkness is so frightening to us. We who are so dependent upon seeing are stripped of that sense in the darkness and we have to rely upon other senses for information about the world around us. Unless we can see we don't feel as though we can really understand and describe our world. We are worried about false steps, afraid that we might be stumbling into a pit or at least heading in the wrong direction.
And, if we cannot see anyone or anything else, it is hard to believe that anyone, even God, can see us. "Surely the darkness shall cover me," the psalmist cries out (Psalm 139:11). In the darkness we are hidden, and no one can find us. In the darkness, we are alone. In the darkness, we can expect no help from anyone, for how can they help us if they can't find us?
When I was a child, we played hide-and-seek in our basement. With the lights turned off, it was extremely dark. It was impossible to find anyone by seeing them; you had to touch them. Occasionally, you would hear a noise that gave you a direction, but most of the time, you simply had to grope blindly around in the dark, hoping that your hand would encounter some part of their body. In the darkness, sight was useless.
And perhaps that is why images of darkness are so powerful and prevalent in religious traditions. Often our faith requires us to learn to rely upon other ways of encountering what is around us. Our normal ways of seeing things are no longer sufficient in this new and strange reality. Like the children in Madeleine L'Engle's book, we need to learn to go deeper than simple sight, and to do that, we often have to be deprived of our normal sight.
It can be a scary process, for how can we possibly move forward when we cannot see? But if we do allow ourselves to explore this new place, we find that our other ways of encountering it are sharpened, and we may learn things about it that we would never have learned had we not been deprived of our sight. In this way, darkness can also be a place of new insight, great creativity, and rebirth.
So it is that the images of darkness in the Scriptures contain the promise of darkness as well as its danger. Darkness is the place of death and of birth. Darkness is the place of struggle and of enlightenment. Darkness is the place of blindness and of encountering God. Darkness is the place of loss and of promise.
As the psalmist discovers, however, darkness is not a place of concealment from God. "If I say, 'Surely the darkness will cover me, / and the light around me turn to night,' / Darkness is not dark to you; / the night is as bright as the day; / darkness and light to you are both alike" (Psalm 139:10-11 BCP). God is present as powerfully in the darkness as in the light, and sometimes God is more powerfully present in the darkness: stripped of our sight, we may be more open to the God for whom "darkness and light are both alike."
If God is in the darkness, then it may be that our avoidance of darkness is a way of avoiding God, or at least of avoiding a deepening of our relationship with God. Staying in the light may seem to be safer, but I have never found staying safe to be conducive to growing closer to God. Darkness, on the other hand, requires me to rely not upon my own resources for safety but upon God. More aware of my need of God in times of darkness, I am more open to God's drawing me in.
Darkness may cover us. It may hide us from others and it may even make it difficult to see ourselves but that darkness may also reveal the One to whom darkness and light are both alike.
Questions for Discussion
1. Have you ever been in darkness that was so complete that you couldn't discern any shapes or edges? What was the occasion and how did you feel about that darkness?
2. Were you afraid of the dark when you were a child? What were you afraid the darkness might be hiding? How comfortable are you with darkness now?
3. In Psalm 139, the writer proclaims that wherever we go, God is present, both in light and in darkness. For many people, however, times of great darkness are more characterized by a sense of God's absence. In the times of darkness in your own life, where has God been? Has the darkness been filled with God's presence or God's absence?
4. When has darkness seemed comforting or helpful?
CHAPTER 2
Let There Be Light: Creation and Creativity
(Genesis 1:1-5)
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. —Genesis 1:1-2
"In the beginning"—the beginning of the Bible, the beginning of all time—there was darkness and emptiness and mystery. In our arguments about whether or not this is an accurate scientific description of the first moments of creation, we have lost the sense of the wonder that these words invoke. It has too often come down to a fight about scientific theories and biblical inerrancies, a fight between twenty-first-century AD science and seventh-century BC revelation.
But was God giving a revelation about science in the time of the priestly writers? There is nothing in the Bible that seems to indicate that the purpose of God's revelation is to explain natural phenomena. Perhaps God doesn't think that revelation is needed to teach us what we can discover for ourselves. Instead, it seems to me that God's revelations are focused upon helping us to understand who we are, who God is, and how we are to relate to God and to other people. These are things that are not so easily discerned through reason. Instead, they are part of mystery.
And it was mystery that I believe the writer of this passage was trying to convey. After the shock of exile, the priestly writer was affirming—against all evidence to the contrary—that Yahweh was the God of the whole earth, and that all of creation was a part of God's plan. This passage is written not in the language of a science textbook but in the language of faith and mystery.
How do you proclaim that everything, absolutely everything, came to be from an act of God? You do this by starting with darkness and nothingness. Darkness covered the face of the deep. Nothing was alive, nothing was moving except the wind or Spirit of God, brooding over the face of the waters, bringing forth life out of the darkness. It was out of the darkness that light came. It was out of the darkness that all that we know came. All of it came out of that Spirit saturated darkness.
In this passage, perhaps more than in any of the other stories of darkness in the Bible, the presence of God is clear and powerful. Before creation, there is nothing in the darkness to obscure God's presence. There is nothing that hides God's presence, for even darkness cannot hide God at the beginning of creation. In the midst of the void, God is.
In The Magician's Nephew, C. S. Lewis describes the beginning of the world of Narnia. When Polly and Digory first arrive, there is nothing. They can see nothing and feel nothing. It is complete darkness, for they have arrived just before the creation of this new world. But they don't have long to wait, for Aslan is at work, much as the Spirit was at work as it brooded over the waters.
In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from which direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful that he could hardly bear it.
In the darkness, the new world of Narnia was sung into existence.
Whether we think of the Spirit moving over the face of the waters as bringing forth life or of God's creating Word thundering from heaven or of a song of incredible beauty singing life into existence, the point of these stories is to glory in the creativity of God, which is reflected in the marvelous creativity that surrounds us. Whether creation happened through the big bang or not is not of primary importance. What is of great importance is that all of creation came to be through the intention and power of God. Creation is God's masterpiece. And just as master artists begin their creations with nothing except their ideas, so God began in the darkness with only an idea, and out of this darkness, God's great creation was born.
Darkness and Creativity
Although we may prefer to spend our time in the light, creativity is a mixture of darkness and light. One of the most famous photographers of all time, Ansel Adams, developed a system by which he could create photographs that showed an incredible contrast range, from the deepest black to dazzling white and all shades in between. Pure black was necessary for his creativity to be released. I know from my own photography efforts that pictures taken at noon, when the sun is directly overhead and shadows are almost nonexistent, tend to be flat and without life and movement. The play of shadow on a person's face brings out their beauty and their personality. We need both light and darkness.
We need both light and darkness in our lives as well. A life that is filled only with light tends to be lived upon the surface. There is no need to delve deeper when all is well and good. Times of great trial, tribulation, and darkness often cause us to grow and develop. In those times, when we are forced to enter our own darkness, we gain access to unexpected depths.
Perhaps it is no accident that Beethoven composed some of his most glorious work after he lost his hearing. The contrast between his outer life of deafness and his inner life of incredible sound was beyond imagining, yet in that time of darkness he wrote works of incredible light.
How often have we gone to bed with a problem weighing upon our mind only to wake up in the middle of the night with a possible solution? In the darkness of night, in the unconsciousness of sleep, our minds become creative. We dream, and as we dream our minds are free to weave together elements of our lives that we might never consider together when we are awake. In our dreaming, possibilities are discovered, and our creativity is enhanced. Of course, sometimes the solutions are bizarre and unworkable, but sorting through the possibilities is the job of the light. Darkness is the place of creation.
Claiming Our Creativity in the Darkness
A friend of mine owns a cottage on one of the Finger Lakes in New York State. It is a place of great beauty and peace. Every year she offers us the use of the cabin for a week. One of my favorite things to do is to sit out on the balcony after everyone else has gone to bed. I watch the stars and listen to the lap of the water on the shore. The stars can be incredible, as there are very few lights around. Many a night I have seen the Milky Way arching across the heavens over my head.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Treasures of Darkness by Tara Soughers. Copyright © 2009 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
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