“Darkness is the light most
feared.”
The Solstice
season is upon us. This is the time when one traditionally celebrates the
return of the light. Each year we live through the darkest part of the year and
focus most of our joy and gratitude upon the celestial turning that returns to
us beginnings and new light. This is the season of the Christmas story,
Kwanzaa, Hannukah, and the New Year. We, collectively, celebrate and honor the
light that shows up in the darkest hour.
This year,
perhaps perversely, I find myself thinking about my gratitude for darkness. I
am well aware that what I am — some strange and contradictory combination of
brokenness and wholeness — is a product, not of light, but, of darkness. I wheel
around aware that I had to be dragged into hellish darkness to be forged into a
new man — a lesser and paradoxically more capable being. It turns out that the
Abyss is part of my parentage.
I used to think
of myself as a kind of diplomat, an emissary from the realm of the needy. I was
one who never hesitated to say that asking for help was one of the most
community building things one could do. I was skewed enough to contradict the
Bible and say that it actually is more blessed to need (to ask and receive)
than to give. Now, however, I’ve come to see that I am really the ambassador of
darkness. I came out of a place so dark that I never want to go back there, but
all of my gifts of awareness were given to me there, and I have come to believe
it is the darkness that gives Life.
I don’t have a
Christmas tree, colored lights, or even candles, but I do have three wise men.
They are all that remains of a once mainstream Christian life. They have stuck
with me, and accompanied me during my lonely, sometimes solitudinal, dark
vigils. I’ve come to see them differently, not just as heroes that persevered
through the desert following a star, but as actual kings of the darkness, who
have shown-up to pay homage to what the darkness has wrought. The star of
Bethlehem is to me a product of the dark mystery surrounding it.
When I first
had my stroke, and had to wait for declining year after declining year to find
out if I would live, I used to curse the darkness of Creation. I was confused
by the painfulness uncertainty of my life. I didn’t know then what I do now. I
was being re-worked, re-made. In an invisible studio I was fitted with an
awareness that could only come from suffering and helplessness. The hands that
held and re-shaped me were not only invisible and non-palpable, they were
stained with darkness, so deep and merciful that I could not imagine it.
Today, I have
the pleasure of knowing many elders, old people who have known dark times – the
sometimes painful, uncertain, and seemingly unending periods (where there is no
human solace deep enough to last) — create compassionate understanding and real
character. The darkness of Life, if it doesn’t kill one, confers a depth of
humanity that cannot be attained any other way. In fact, darkness is the
birthplace of depth. Hidden in the shadows is a dark gem, not one anyone can
grasp, but one that sometimes grasps us. The broken body, job, relationship, or
lifestyle, is a terrible well-spring that unleashes hard-won wisdom into the
world.
I don’t really
know how to be thankful for such a demanding and seemingly arbitrary
fruitfulness. I feel hugely ambivalent about even harboring this awareness. I
know I have much to give thanks for, that some angel must have had to endure a
lot to give me a chance to write these words, but I would not wish this
experience upon anyone. The darkness is just too exacting.
Still, here in
the traumatized aftermath, I am thankful! I don’t really know how to express
it, I don’t know how to honestly honor the unimaginable, but I know I owe this
part of what is good about my life, to that which perched and feed upon me long
enough that I became a being capable of being grateful for darkness. To me,
this is the real gift of the season, one that in this dark-age offers a great
deal.
In the end, I
guess I write these words to remember what darkness has granted me, and to
remind everyone that light sometimes shows up as darkness.
