The Beauty of Darkness
I want you to imagine with me, for a moment, the darkest place you’ve ever been. I mean, actual physical darkness. Maybe you’ve had the opportunity to go out West and sit under a moonless sky. Maybe you grew up in the country or have visited family there, and realized, as you were going to sleep, that there were no streetlights or other ambient light filtering in through the windows--that the room was completely dark. Maybe you’ve been able to visit a cave or some other underground location before and be completely enclosed by darkness, darkness so deep you lose your sense of orientation, darkness so deep you cannot see your hands or feet.
As Barbara Brown Taylor points out in her book Learning to Walk in the Dark, while darkness was a common experience for most of human history, it is rarer and rarer to find truly dark places today. We suffer from what she calls “nyctophobia,” a collective fear of the dark. For example, because of light pollution, we have made it virtually impossible to see the Milky Way from the entire eastern half of the United States. Think about that: we cannot literally see our place in the universe, our home in the cosmos, the source of countless myths and stories and also simply a thing of great beauty, because of human intervention.
Maybe it’s not that we so much fear the darkness as privilege the light. Our light sources are many, and they are brighter than they used to be. We are constantly sending signals to our body through our phones, our tablets, our laptops, and even through streetlights and security lights coming in through our windows to wake us up--even when we want to sleep, even when we need to sleep. And our constantly lighted society negatively affects the animals around us, who are often confused into thinking it is daytime even at night. Their cycles of life get thrown off, and they become more susceptible to stress and even death because of all of this artificial light.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that light is good and darkness is bad.
Somewhere along the way, we decided to be afraid of the dark.
Maybe we are afraid of the dark because it represents uncertainty, and we like to be certain.
Maybe we are afraid of the dark because it forces us to be alone with our selves, and we don’t know what we’ll find there.
Maybe we are afraid of the dark because we privilege physical sight more than spiritual sight.
Maybe we are afraid of the dark because it reminds us that we are not ultimately in control of our own destinies.
The season of Lent is meant to be a season of darkness. In the churches, we take away many of the beautiful objects that typically adorn our sacred spaces. In our lives, we either give up things that are important to us, or we try to adopt new spiritual practices. In some ways, we are taking away the light. But remember: taking away the light can also reveal the beauty of the darkness. For example, when we removed the altar coverings from my home church, Epiphany, we revealed the beauty of the wood in the altar, beauty that is always there but hidden. If we took away the lights at night, we could see the beauty of the cosmos that is always already there.
Lent’s emphasis on darkness and simple beauty is also meant to take away the complexity of our lives, the busyness of our lives. Being busy is kind of like walking in the light. It makes us think that we are in control. It makes us feel important. It makes us seem to be doing what we are supposed to be doing.
But being busy is more deceptive than we realize. In Lent, we are supposed to be less busy. We are supposed to simplify. We are supposed to open up time and space in our lives for reflection, and thought, and prayer. What we may find may be more beautiful than we anticipated.
Yet when we go to silence and darkness, at first, we may be fearful or uncomfortable. In silence, it is difficult to know what to say--until we might finally realize that maybe we are not supposed to be saying anything at all. Or doing anything at all. Maybe we are meant to wait on God in ways that are more fundamentally radical than we realize.
Another way of thinking of it is this: in Lent, we are stripping away all the false selves that we present before others. You all know exactly what I mean. Think with me for a minute. There is the self we present to our parents; the self we present to our friends; the self we present online; the self we present to our romantic partners or spouses; the self we present to our children or grandchildren; the self we present in our houses of worship; the self might we present on stage or in the office; and many, many, more selves.
Lent encourages us to walk in the darkness. When we do so, we start to strip away all those selves and look at the most fundamental question: who am I, really? What is left after all the things I think are myself are gone?
Many of you might remember reading The Odyssey in school, Homer’s epic tale of the Greek hero who, through perseverance and determination, makes it back home after the Trojan War and restores peace and order to his kingdom.
In the traditions of epic poetry, the hero always descends into the underworld to speak with the spirits of the dead. There, the hero overcomes their fear and gains valuable information, as well as information, to continue their quest. You can see this tradition as walking in the darkness. The hero has to leave behind what they are comfortable with, what they know best, to embrace a dark and unknown path. Yet it is precisely in that path that they discover the truth about themselves and their quest, they learn to reject falsehoods, and they emerge from the underworld renewed and strengthened to complete their quest.
There are biblical stories with a similar pattern.
In 1st Kings chapter 19, the prophet Elijah is coming off of a mountaintop experience. He had just had a confrontation with the King of Israel, Ahab, and his wife, Jezebel, in which he proved, in a contest, that the Lord God was the one true God and that the idols that Ahab and Jezebel worshipped were false gods. For a biblical prophet, that’s a pretty good day.
But then Ahab and Jezebel, predictably, are upset and put a contract out on Prophet Elijah’s life. They want to kill him. So Elijah thinks he’s done the right thing by making this huge demonstration of God’s power and might and, seemingly, nothing good has come of it; he’s followed the path that he thought God had laid out for him and the king and queen are trying to kill him. So he tells God, in a fit of despair, that he’s done.
God says, OK, I understand; let me speak to you, Elijah; I will respond: but not in the sound of a mighty wind; not in the strength of a powerful earthquake, and not in the heat of a destructive fire, but in the sound of sheer silence.
I love this phrase: the sound of sheer silence. Part of what God seems to be communicating to Elijah is that, despite his recent efforts to prove the majesty and worth of God in the contest with the prophets of Baal, God is not found in loud, miraculous, ostentatious displays--in other words, in Elijah’s expectations about what God is like.
For here, in this intimate exchange between God and the prophet, God’s voice is not loud, or majestic, or magnificent. Elijah can only hear it in complete and total silence. In darkness. In quietness. Only there is he able to shut out all the other voices competing for attention--the ones that tell him he’s inadequate, the ones that tell him that he always make mistakes, the ones that tell him that he should just give up.
Deep, deep, in the darkness of listening, Elijah hears the true voice of God that tells him the truest thing about himself and his vocation.
Jesus, too, has his own quest of self-discovery. He goes into the desert to pray and fast; to enter a period of darkness; to get closer to God and to figure out what kind of ministry, what kind of life, he will lead for God and for others. He fasts and prays because those were traditional ways of stripping away the comforts of life, and helping people to focus intently on the life of the spirit.
In Jesus’s “vision quest,” as one Native American theologian calls it, he is allowing the silence to speak.
And in the silence, he hears a voice--not the voice of God, but the voice of temptation--alluring him with three ways in which he could be false to his true self, and false to God.
In each of the three temptations, Jesus is enticed to take the easy way out, the miraculous, magical way, the way of the big, fancy display, instead of staying “in the human world with its conflict and risk,” as one writer puts it. Instead of giving into the temptation, in other words, to be above us, and other than us, Jesus chooses to be with us, and like us.
One temptation he faces is that Jesus would satisfy himself before considering the needs of others. That he would rely on miracles such as turning stones to bread--after forty days of fasting, when he’s really, really hungry--merely to be self-serving rather than to serve the needs of God’s people. Jesus rejects this temptation because he knows he has come to serve humanity and to show others the path of service.
Like Jesus, we, too, find our true selves tempted to be self-serving, to find shortcuts, to cheat, lie, and steal our way to the top rather than to rely on the gifts of God and our own integrity.
Another temptation Jesus faces is that he would jump from the top of the Temple, in the heart of Jerusalem, and simply prove his worth and vocation in life in an outlandish and miraculous way. But Jesus rejects this temptation, too, because he knows the proof of his Divine Mission will come in sacrificial love rather than extraordinary miracles.
Like Jesus, we find our true selves tempted to exalt our own voices and the voices of people who look, think, and act like us rather than allow others, especially those who have been pushed out and marginalized, to speak and to lead.
Finally, Jesus is offered power on earth, all the power and influence and wealth he could possibly want. But he resists that temptation, too, choosing to wield his power in ministry to the poor, the outcast, the hurting, the confused, the suffering.
In the darkness, in the silence, Elijah hears the paradoxically silent voice of God. And in the darkness, in the silence, Jesus hears the voices that enable him to discern his vocation, his calling, his mission, his purpose.
We, too, need the silences, the spaces, the darknesses of Lent.
We, too, need the time, to cease the ceaseless activity of everyday life; to pray, and fast, and learn how we can be the truest version of our self.
Our former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, notes this so well in a sermon entitled “A Ray of Darkness.” There, he reminds us that God comes to us most closely in the events and periods of our lives that we might call “darknesses”: those moments when we are “interrupted” and “turned inside out.” But more than moments, Dr. Williams says: our life, our disciplines of prayer and attention, all “allo[w us] to find and lose and refine ourselves in the interweaving patterns of a world we did not make and do not control.”
Jesus is our pioneer, the one who has been through the darkness, the one who “interrupts and disturbs and remakes the world”: but he does so according to love, and peace, and mercy, and grace. He does not leave us with our questions answered, and yet in him, we have the deepest assurance of something even more fundamental than having our questions answered, for he is the question and the answer, the darkness and the light, the home and center and wellspring of all that we are and all that we will ever be.
As John Donne says,
He brought light out of darkness,
Not out of a lesser light.
He can bring thy summer out of winter
Though thou have no spring.
May we, in the darkness of Lent, in the darkness of this Lent, find the beauty of God’s never-changing and always-springing Love.
AMEN.