In Praise of Darkness

A Worship Service by the Reverends Mark W. Christian & Jonalu Johnstone

Delivered to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday November 27, 2005

Reading

In The Darkness of Winter

Jennifer S. Getsinger

In the darkness of winter the rains come.

Earth draws her mantle of darkness and moisture nearer,

pulls her grey blanket of clouds closer around her mountain shoulders.

On icy heights the mountains become the storehouses of the snow.

On forested slopes and in lowland rainforests, evergreens soak in the nurturing water,

and draw it into the soil.

Groundwater seeps into networks of cracks in Coast Range granite,

as rocks become the storehouses of the rain.

In darkness, and underground,

the Earth draws in rainwater down along beds of porous sandstone

to wash the fossil leaves of ancient rainforests,

to cleanse the black layers of underlying coal,

waiting in the sleep of millions of years

while holding potential warmth and light for a future age.

In the darkness of winter as sunfire wanes and life forms sleep,

the cycles of earth, air, and water blur and mingle:

our drinking water may be muddy with mineral silt;

the solid ground seems to melt into rivers beneath our feet;

and the air we breathe is an ocean of dampness.

In the darkness of winter, we too need to rest and sleep,

and draw in the groundwater now

that will later nourish the springs of our souls.

Meditation and Prayer

November 27, 2005

Harvest Celebration

This time of year, perhaps more than others, the cycles of the seasons touch our lives and souls.  We notice nature; the leaves colored both brightly and fading to dull brown, fall to earth.  The light changes, darkness engulfing us earlier in the day, inspiring us to retreat to the comfort of our homes.  Weather changes our wardrobe day by day, hour by hour.  We notice nature this time of year.

Most of the time, we, here in the city, can ease ourselves into the illusion that we are distinct from the natural world.  Our food comes wrapped in plastic more often than streaked with dirt.  We can forget that meat is animals, that vegetables are roots and stems and stalks and flowers of plants, that fruits and nuts are a means of propagation, not just a sweet treat.  Harvest Celebration – like the seasonal changes upon us -- reminds us of these basics – that we are connected with the earth.

After this meditation, we will sing one verse of our hymn during which the children will come forward to share the Harvest Celebration with us.  Then we will conclude the hymn.

Let us be together in the spirit of meditation and prayer:  Be aware of your breath.  The breath connects us with one another and with the earth.  We breathe in oxygen, essential to life, air that we share with one another, produced from carbon dioxide by plants that color, scent, and adorn our lives.  The molecules of air have existed in one form or another for eons of time, moving from shape to shape.  The atoms of the air you breathe may have been immersed in water, embedded in rock, coursing through the bloodstream of a farm animal or a queen, building blocks of tiny creatures or giant cedars.  How can we fail to be thankful for our breath?

No matter how far we move from it, we remain connected with the earth, all its beings and matter.  We are adam -- of the earth.  As earthlings, we are thankful for all that nourishes us from the ground – bread from the grains of the world – wheat, rice, oats, corn – fruit  – apples, pears, mangos, bananas, grapes.  Nuts, greens, poultry, fish, meat.  We recognize and revere the miracle that food is.

We remain connected with the earth, influenced by the cycles of light and darkness; inspired by earth’s beauty, awed by its fearsome danger.  As the ancient ones sang in the Homeris Hymns:

I will sing of the well-founded Earth,

Mother of all, eldest of all beings.

She feeds all creatures that are in the world,

All that go upon the goodly land,

All that are in the paths of the seas,

And all that fly;

All these are fed of her store.

Through you, O Queen, we are blessed

In our children, and in our harvest

And to you we owe our lives.

AMEN.

In Praise of Darkness

A Sermon by the Reverend Mark W. Christian

Delivered to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday November 27, 2005

A request filtered over to me recently from the Cathedral of Hope.  The church that rents our sanctuary for their worship on Sunday evenings had a problem.  “It’s too dark outside when we come and go from our service,” wondering if I could do something about it.  Now, I am not without gifts and abilities—but nowhere in my call to serve this church does “Arbiter of Day and Night” come into play.  Of course, as my delusions of grandeur waned, I realized that what they really wanted was for me to adjust the timer that automatically turns on the lights on the porch outside the sanctuary.  Due to an anomaly in the layout of this building, those controls ARE located in my office, so while “Parsing Light and Dark” isn’t my responsibility, the seasonal adjustment of the timer controlling the lights is.

Sometimes the tension between Dark and Light is physical.  Sometimes it is metaphorical, sometimes psychological.  Sometimes the issue is simply the lack of light at a given place and time.  There are times, though, that the problem is an over abundance of light making darkness a scarce commodity.  This is true both physically and spiritually.

I encountered a problem of the “Too-much-light” variety when I served a church in New Mexico.  Among other characteristics, southern New Mexico, is a very popular place for astronomy.  The high altitude, low population and dry air create a good environment for astronomers.  The number one enemy of astronomers, it turns out, is terrestrial light—the glow that accompanies the many lamps, houses and signs that human beings erect as we civilize the world.

The church in Las Cruces had just completed a major construction project when the city passed a “Dark Sky” ordinance.  This kind of law identifies excess light as a form of pollution and mandates that exterior lights be designed to avoid light spilling off of the property on which they are housed.  Baffles and filters must be used so that light from new signs and construction goes neither outward nor upward beyond the area it is designed to cover.

One of the founders of the church in Las Cruces was Clyde Tombaugh, credited with the discovery of Pluto and founder of the Astronomy department at New Mexico State University—so it is a given that many in the church were well aware of the problems of light pollution.  As it turns out, our construction plans were approved just before the new regulations took effect.  Our building was perfectly legal—but it was leaking light.  It was glowing like a beacon—and in this case being a beacon is not a good thing.

Congregational leaders were approached by a group of stargazers who asked when the new buildings would be brought into compliance with the Dark Skies initiative.  “It isn’t required” was the first response since the new construction was approved before the regulations took effect—that answer lacked something, though.  Among the issues was money.  The manufacturer of the lights had a retrofit kit—but it cost about $400 per light to install and there were about a dozen exterior lights.  The construction budget was tight, and we were ten to twenty thousand dollars short of what we needed for landscaping already.  Putting another five grand into filters for lights that weren’t out of compliance was not high on the list of expenditures at that point.

Money, wasn’t the only issue, here.  Leaders began to weigh the relative value of dark skies and a well-lit building.  Dark skies are nice.  Astronomy is an important venture.  The advantage of dark skies began to be placed on a scale with safety.  How does one weigh the somewhat esoteric advantage of a dark sky with the earthly realities of safety and security?  These were security lights after all—intended to make the new buildings and parking lots safe.  I will tell you that in discussions of church facilities, safety trumps almost everything for me.  Safety even trumps money.  I was charged with the task of communicating to our astronomy buffs that due to money and safety that the changes they sought were well down the list of priorities. 

The logic is simple.  More light means more safety.  More darkness means more danger.  The problem is that this logic, while simple, is flawed.  More light does not always mean more safety.  Anyone who has had to squint or adjust their car visor when driving into the sun knows that more light does not always mean better visibility.  Anyone who has had to flash their lights at an oncoming driver who is driving with their bright lights on understands that too much light can be a problem.

As it turns out—in something of a counter intuitive revelation—more light on buildings and parking lots does not make them safer.  If the excess light becomes glare, it not only makes it harder to see, it discourages us from looking.  Studies show that people don’t look at buildings that are overly lit because of glare.  You can light a building all you want but if people look the other way because the light hurts their eyes then the building is not made appreciably safer.

What is required, I discovered, is a balance between light and dark.  This is true in the world of security.  This is true in the world of physics and astronomy.  To the point today, this is also true in the world of spirituality and religion. 

Matthew Fox, the radical, former, Dominican Priest outlines part of this spiritual conundrum in his book “Original Blessing.”

The Enlightenment—the en-light-en-ment—has rendered all of who live in Western civilization citizens of the light.  And of lights.  Questers after left-brain—which is light-oriented—satisfaction.  The invention of the light bulb and electricity and neon lights and handy light switches was a marvelous outgrowth of the Enlightenment’s technological achievements … Religion too has become very light-oriented in the West.  The religion of Positivism is almost all light.  And the sentimental hymns that ignore the dark or reduce it anthropomorphically to human sin and therefore to salvation contribute to the lighting of our world.

Fox continues,

What price have we paid as a people for all this light?  We have become afraid of the dark.  Afraid of no light … We whore after more—more images, more light, more profits, more goodies … Our souls in the process shrivel up.  For growth of the human person takes place in the dark.  Under ground.  In subterranean passages.  There, where “no image has ever reached into the souls foundation,” God alone works.  A light-oriented spirituality is superficial, surface-like, lacking as it does the deep, dark roots that nourish and surprise and ground the large tree.

Fox does not advocate an abandonment of light.  He does not suggest we jettison the enlightenment.  He does point out that human beings do not live by light alone.  He speaks “In Praise of Darkness” noting that darkness plays an important role in our spiritual health.

This time of year those of us in the Northern Hemisphere discover our world becoming increasingly dark.  We see less sun.  The world grows dusky.  Shadows prevail over the land so we switch on lights.  Sometimes we switch on so many lights that it seems like we are intent on defeating the darkness, driving it back into its primordial storehouse.

What would happen if instead of fighting the dark, we allowed the dark to be dark?  What would it be like if we allowed ourselves to be subsumed into the darkness?  What kind of stillness might we discover in the dark?  Our lives are full of light—but sometimes we still can’t see.  What if the problem isn’t the dark?  Is it possible that part of our spiritual hunger comes from being too long in the light?

The problem is that the darkness scares us.  Something deep inside says it isn’t safe in the dark.  Perhaps this fear grows from the lessons learned by our earliest ancestors who discovered that darkness hides predators.  Perhaps this fear percolates from the deep recesses of our psyche that desire to see and comprehend all things.  When darkness proves impenetrable to understanding our conscious mind urges us to vanquish it.  Perhaps we light the dark because part of us fears what we might become in the dark.  Part of us lives in terror for what we might do in a world where no one sees.

The darkness reminds us that we live in a wispy moment hung between being and nothingness.  We may live 100 years—but how many eons have passed before we were?  How many will pass when we have ceased to be?  We were born to particular parents in a particular time and place—but how many untold coincidences did it take to bring us into existence just as we are?  This is part of the existential angst that becomes inescapable in the dark.  This is the existential pain that all our light—all our enlightenment—tries to mask since it can not be resolved.

In the dark, life is filled with mystery—mysteries to live with and mysteries live into.  In the light, a mystery becomes a problem in search of a solution.  Make no mistake—the part of us that seeks solutions to problems is important.  It is holy.  It is a gift from God.  The trick is that the mystery as mystery is also a gift.  Adding part of us that knows awe and appreciates mystery to our rational self—make us whole—wholly human and holy in spirit.

What if, instead of rallying against the dark, we decided to let the dark be the dark?  What if instead of creating ever more light we occasionally learned to sit amid nothingness and simply be?  What if in all our existential vulnerability we were simply to BE?  You don’t have to love the dark.  You certainly don’t have to hate the light but what would life be like if we regularly admitted ourselves into the dark—physically, emotionally and spiritually?

My sense is that we would gain a depth of being from the dark.  The light helps us to see horizons—it offers us a sense of the breadth of life.  The darkness takes us inward.  Perhaps the inward journey would offer us the same kind of spiritual depth that the outward journey of life gives us of breadth.

The world right now grows dark—it grows physically dark.  For the next three and half weeks the hours of sunlight are increasingly displaced by night.  As a culture and as a religious people we observe a number of celebrations that focus on light this time of year.  The Solstice celebrates the return of the light.  Hanukkah remembers a time when lamps miraculously burned beyond the reservoirs of their fuel.  Christmas is celebrated with light—and is theologically understood by Christians to honor the entry to spiritual light into the world.

These celebrations are fine.  I don’t begrudge anyone Solstice or Hanukkah, Advent or Christmas.  I simply wonder how much more meaningful these might be if, before we celebrated the light, we learned something of the dark.  It goes against form, I know.  It is counter intuitive but how much deeper might our experience of the joys of this season be if were to first learn to live with and “In Praise of Darkness?”

The world grows dark right now.  There are sound scientific, astronomical, reasons why our world is dark this time of year.  The good news is that THIS darkness is predictable and it will pass.  The holiday season is, in part, an assurance of that fact.  The truth is, though, that there is darkness of THE world and there is darkness of OUR world.  Physical darkness is predicable but one never knows when our personal world will grow dark.  If only our lives could be governed by astronomical laws.  Our personal darkness can take the form of loss of job, health, love, esteem, wealth, security, companionship or a myriad of other manifestations of our humanity.  One of the profound tests of our humanity comes when we find ourselves in the eclipse of emotional, spiritual and psychological light.

Why speak In Praise of Darkness?  Of this Darkness?  I do so because we have a natural tendency to flee from this darkness.  This means that we flee from a natural part of life.  Make no mistake darkness can be dangerous.  The darkness can consume us.  Still, part of me is called to acknowledge that the dark is as much a part of life as is the light.  Once we have been in the darkness, and let it be what it will be, then we are better prepared for the other seasons of darkness that will inevitably touch us.  Until we let darkness be darkness we live in a kind of existential fear.  Once we have known the darkness we discover it can be transcended.  Once we have known the darkness as darkness then we can help others in their times of trial and fear.  Only when we have known darkness as darkness we can at last know and truly rejoice in the light.

On this day, on the cusp of this season of Advent—I urge you to seek out, rejoice in and experience the lights of the season.  On the cusp of this darkened time, though, I also counsel that we acknowledge that which is natural—that which is as much a part of us as our enlightenment.  Today I offer praise for the darkness.  May its mystery restore, refresh and rehabilitate us.  AMEN