“All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray,” once sang the Mamas and the Papas…Isaiah puts it differently and quite a bit more dramatically, ” Behold darkness covers the land; a deep gloom enshrouds the people. My father’s mantra to my brothers and me regarding curfew while we were teenagers was that “nothing good happens after midnight.” For millennia the human race has grappled with the unruly darkness, literal darkness and the more fearful, figurative darkness, darkness in its myriad manifestations, personal, communal, global. But over the ages prophets and poets alike have also proclaimed that indeed there is light which not only stands against the dark , but engenders potential for newness and growth within it; that this light dispels our primordial fear of the dark, emboldens us in the knowledge that life is worth living….that all peoples and nations would be drawn through the dark to this light.
Perhaps the reason anxiety in our culture spikes at this dark time of year (psychiatry tells us as much), is not so much due to our busyness, but because of our ancient innate fear of the dark and the uncertainty it engenders…. the dark juxtaposed with a seemingly tenuous promise that the light will have the last word, a tenuous promise that flickers candle-like against the coming winds of winter….that as the signs of death in nature are all around us, we recall the promise of new life which will spring forth from the dark in its time….I’m saying perhaps it is this profound ambiguity, this cosmic ambiguity that is forever with us that causes us to feel faint at heart especially as we approach the darkest time of the year, and in the dark times of our lives. The point obviously was not lost on the ancient religious practitioners setting the celebration of the nativity of Jesus just after the winter solstice, staking a claim of the certain return of light to the world in spite of the dark. I would say that the most creative way to cope with the season and for that matter, life itself, is to be open to the dark and the promise of the light….the life of faith involves both.
This is a difficult road, this life of faith…It requires all that we are and all that we have. It requires profound trust. Many years ago we (Nativity Dothan, my home parish) hosted a noted speaker to present a two day program in a retreat style setting. At one point in the program he asked us to write a prayer for ourselves…for each of us to jot down on a piece of paper a prayer we wished to say for ourselves…I’ve long since lost the piece of paper, but I still remember the prayer, and often in my days in the dark I repeat it: “O God, grant me the courage to be.” To live into our humanity, to truly be, we must muster the courage, ask for the courage to stand with integrity amid the dark with the knowledge that the light will come. In the beginning was the dark, until the creator said, let there be light…may it ever so swiftly come; let us trust whole-heartedly that it will.
