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The only strategy I had ever been taught for dealing with my fear of the dark was to turn on the lights and yell for help.
“darkness” is shorthand for anything that scares me—that I want no part of—either because I am sure that I do not have the resources to survive it or because I do not want to find out.
Instead, I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.
the trouble starts when darkness falls on your life, which can happen in any number of unsurprising ways: you lose your job, your marriage falls apart, your child acts out in some attention-getting way, you pray hard for something that does not happen, you begin to doubt some of the things you have been taught about what the Bible says.
the gift of lunar spirituality, in which the divine light available to me waxes and wanes with the season.
All in all, the moon is a truer mirror for my soul than the sun that looks the same way every day.
Did I have enough faith to explore the dark instead of using faith to bar all my doors?
If there is any truth to the teaching that spiritual reality is divided into halves, it is the truth that those pairs exist in balance, not opposition. What can light possibly mean without dark? Who knows spirit without also knowing flesh? Is anyone altogether good or altogether evil? Where is the church that exists outside the world? People of faith who are committed to fullness of life have our work cut out for us, if only in changing the way we talk.
the growing awareness that our own seasons were numbered and we did not have forever to start paying attention to them.
During the day it is hard to remember that all the stars in the sky are out there all the time, even when I am too blinded by the sun to see them.
the original version of Cinderella, two pigeons peck out her nasty stepsisters’ eyes, and they spend the rest of their lives as blind beggars, while Cinderella goes to live in the castle with her prince. In the original version of Snow White, the wicked Queen, who asks the huntsman to kill the young beauty and bring back her heart, ends up being forced to dance to death in red-hot iron shoes.
Once you start noticing how many important things happen at night in the Bible, the list grows fast. Jacob wrestles an angel by a river all night long, surviving the match with a limp, a blessing, and a new name. His son Joseph dreams such dreams at night that he catches a pharaoh’s attention, graduating from the dungeon to the palace to become the royal interpreter of dreams. The exodus from Egypt happens at night; God parts the Red Sea at night; manna falls from the sky in the wilderness at night—and that is just the beginning.
mysterium tremendum et fascinans—the terrible and fascinating mystery of God—which exceeds human ability to manage it in any way.
Gregory of Nyssa was the first to see Moses’s cloud as a cipher for the spiritual life. “Moses’s vision began with light,” he wrote. “Afterwards God spoke to him in a cloud. But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect, he saw God in the darkness.”
Every time we turn on a light after dark, receptors in our eyes and skin send messages to our adrenal, pituitary, and pineal glands to stop what they are doing and get ready for the new day.
Fluorescent lights and computer screens both flicker on and off at about 60–120 cycles a second, which is enough to fool your brain into thinking that the sun is coming up, but even the light from a cell phone charger or a glow-in-the-dark clock can cue your body that morning is under way. When that happens, your adrenal gland starts pumping more adrenaline into your bloodstream to handle the stress of an ordinary day. This tells your pituitary gland to back off on the human growth hormone your body uses to repair your muscles and bones at night. It also signals your pineal gland to stop
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What if I could learn to trust my feelings instead of asking to be delivered from them? What if I could follow one of my great fears all the way to the edge of the abyss, take a breath, and keep going? Isn’t there a chance of being surprised by what happens next?
In this view, the best thing to do when fear has a neck hold on you is to befriend someone who lives in real and constant fear. The best thing to do when you are flattened by despair is to spend time in a community where despair is daily bread. The best thing to do when sadness has your arms twisted behind your back is to sit down with the saddest child you know and say, “Tell me about it. I have all day.”
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,” Carl Jung wrote, “but by making the darkness conscious.”
Why had I never paid attention to the sounds of trees before? Surely the leaves of an oak made a different sound in the wind than the needles of a pine, the same way they made a different sound underfoot.
At the very least, it makes me wonder how seeing has made me blind—by giving me cheap confidence that one quick glance at things can tell me what they are, by distracting me from learning how the light inside me works, by fooling me into thinking I have a clear view of how things really are, of where the road leads, of who can see rightly and who cannot. I am not asking to become blind, but I have become a believer. There is a light that shines in the darkness, which is only visible there.
new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.
Anyone on a spiritual path needs help from time to time in telling the difference between divine disturbance and mental disorder.
When the dark night first falls, it is natural to spend some time wondering if it is a test or punishment for something you have done. This is often a sly way of staying in control of the situation, since the possibility that you have caused it comes with the hope that you can also put an end to it, either by passing the test or by enduring the punishment.
The darker possibility—that this night is beyond your control—is often too frightening to consider at first, at least partly because it means that none of your usual strategies for lightening up is going to work. One of the hardest things to decide during a dark night is whether to surrender or resist. The choice often comes down to what you believe about God and how God acts, which means that every dark night of the soul involves wrestling with belief.
the dark night is a love story, full of the painful joy of seeking the most elusive lover of all. In the second place, he is no help at all to anyone seeking a better grip on God. One of the central functions of the dark night, he says, is to convince those who grasp after things that God cannot be grasped.
Fowler’s stages still sound familiar: the fantasy-filled, imitative faith of early childhood, followed by the more literal faith of schoolchildren; then the conventional faith of adolescence, largely inherited, followed by the individuated faith of young adulthood. Plenty of people stop there, he says, while others go on to stages he finds harder and harder to describe. At the fifth stage, which Fowler says is unusual before midlife, people know “the sacrament of defeat.” They live with the consequences of choices they cannot unchoose. They
In the sixteenth century, “to believe” meant “to set the heart upon,” or “to give the heart to,” as in, “I believe in love.”
so there is nothing to do but lie in the dark with something heavy on their chests, listening for a voice in the darkness that does not come.
God puts out our lights to keep us safe, John says, because we are never more in danger of stumbling than when we think we know where we are going.
this stage of my life, this sounds like a fifth Gospel, in which the good news is that dark and light, faith and doubt, divine absence and presence, do not exist at opposite poles. Instead, they exist with and within each other, like distinct waves that roll out of the same ocean and roll back into it again.
That invention was the spiritual tipping point, he says. By providing us with good, cheap light, the lightbulb allowed us to make advances in every area of human enterprise, convincing us that there was nothing we could not handle with just a little more light.
Although I am not Catholic, I am devoted to Mary. Part of it is that she is a she; the other part is that she is entirely human. Most of the time I think she understands me better than her son does, since she has a whole DNA spiral and a body that operates on a lunar cycle—or did.
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and
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