If the light that is in you is darkness, how great is
that darkness! (Matthew 6:23)
How can the light that is in
me be darkness? I think this is
difficult to talk about because we are so defensive. Our choices in life are what they are. Sometimes we made decisions, took choices
which are now at least problematic… but mostly it just happened, we played the
cards we were dealt… we grew up in a family or tribal environment which was imperfect,
violent or simply ignorant… or the circumstances of adult life forced choices
on us which we couldn’t help… But at any
rate it is not helpful to me if you point out that things should be otherwise,
or if you criticise what I do. I don’t
know that it’s darkness, the way I’m living – I hope not -- but it is often
very gloomy, and I do the best I can. Anyway,
you’re not so perfect…! Have you had
that conversation?
Well Jesus felt free to be
stridently critical of some people’s choices.
The scribes and the pharisees lived for the sacred law, irrespective of
its effects on ordinary folk… whited
sepulchres, Jesus called them. The
priest and the levite who walked past the injured man on the road to Jericho
evidently lived for moral and ritual purity, and also considered a Samaritan, a
foreigner, not worth their bother. Jesus
immortalised their choices in a memorable story. The man who built bigger barns to store his
wealth was living for that because, as he said, he could now take his ease, eat
drink and be merry. That was his dream…
you’ve got to have a dream. The men who
thought it proper to stone an alleged adulteress to death inhabited some essential
male cult of power and control… numerous men still do. In our day it has become trendy in some
circles to live “Me-Time”, so the self, the ego, comes to have dominance and
priority. For many, hedonism in all its
forms seems the obvious way of life – what else is there? Looking for happiness… but in the wrong
places, says Thomas Keating. Religion
too, it must be said, no less in our day can be pretty dark… darker to the
extent that it misrepresents the way of Jesus, and relies on ignorance,
superstition, credulity and greed.
St Paul taught the way of
Christ as a bringing of light in our dark places: It is
the God who said “Let light shine out of darkness” who has shone in our hearts
to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus
Christ (II Cor 4:6). The light shines in the darkness, writes
John, and the darkness has not overcome
it (Jn 1:5). John Henry Newman wrote of the kindly light by which he now lives – I was not ever thus, he added… I loved the garish day… pride ruled my will… I woke, the dungeon flamed with light,
sang Charles Wesley. Once you were in darkness, writes Paul
to the Ephesians, but now in the Lord you
are light. Live as children of light…
the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true… Take no part in the unfruitful works of
darkness, but instead expose them…
Therefore it is said (and here he quotes from some early Christian
hymn): “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will give you
light”.
The contemplative experience
is that, in the disciplines of silence and stillness, in our readiness to set
self aside, and in our hospitality to the Spirit of the Risen Lord, we begin to
see things in the light of Christ, we come to know at the level of our deepest
and best self, and we find the freedom to respond in love.
And this is the judgement, that the light has come
into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light… Those who do what is true come to the light… (John 3:19-21)
God is light and in him there is no darkness at
all… Whoever says “I am in the light”,
while hating a brother or sister, is still in the darkness… walks in the dark,
and does not know the way to go, because the darkness has brought on blindness. (I John 1:5;
2:9-10)
So, somewhat in contrast to
what we were saying last week, as far as biblical John is concerned, darkness does
not have a lot going for it, in fact it is to be avoided, it is to be departed
from. He says you will get lost, the
dark will make you blind. For the moment
let’s just accept that in both Jewish and Christian scriptures, each speaks
with two voices on the theme of light and darkness. Here, darkness is not what we want at
all. God is light. Jesus is the light of the world – whoever
follows him will not walk in darkness.
He says his followers are a light set on a hill, presumably in the
surrounding dark.
Well, John was writing after
one, more likely two generations of experience of church life. Jews and Gentiles, Greeks and Romans and
numerous other cultures and nationalities, with their differing customs and
folkways and assumptions, had been responding to the message of Christ,
becoming followers… and then trying, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s 20th
century words, Gemeinsames Leben…
Life Together, in community, in communion.
This was not only a matter of living in peace together in the Christian
community – it was also relating in peace and love to people, good and bad,
beyond the Christian community, often hostile to it… as Jesus taught.
John makes some startling
statements. He says people love darkness rather than light. Darkness is more comfortable because it can
hide things, it offers denial, deceit and evasion… concealment of the truth. John almost equates light and truth – those who do what is true come to the light. Because they seek what is true they have no
fear of the light. Notice also that he
says simply what is true… not what may
be prescribed in religion, not what we think the Bible says. If it is true, then it is true whether it’s
in the Bible or not, whether I feel it or agree with it, or not. To reject what is true, to ignore it, to
distort it, is indeed in John’s view to be in the dark… Well, how do I know what is true? That is the point of faith… I am seeking
to live truly in the light I can see, so far as it lies with me, seeking
the light I can’t see yet or perhaps only glimpse. I am at any rate on the side of truth... and
that at times is costly.
John gives us one important
practical hint: Whoever says “I am in the light”, while hating a brother or sister, is
still in the dark… walks in the dark, and does not know the way to go, because
the dark has brought on blindness. Two
things here… Hatred, which as we know is
generally the child of fear, is a major sign of darkness. And the second is that blindness is its
fruit. There are people for whom hatred
has become a way of life – or it may be their chronic woundedness, victimhood,
reliving memories and injustices -- and they become blinded by the dark they have
chosen… and by their fear and anxiety. John
says that we learn love, and therefore living in the light, from the indwelling
Christ, the Teacher within. He invites
us to the way of Jesus… and to the gentle disciplines of letting-go, of living
in the present, and of having a heart of love and gratitude.
Darkness is as light to you. (Psalm 139:12)
In the Christian scriptures
we find two distinct ways of looking at darkness and light. One of them is what we might expect… that
darkness is the realm of menace, perhaps even evil. So, this strand says it is important to come
out of the dark into the light. The
other strand teaches that darkness is not our enemy. In grown-up spiritual understanding we learn
to be ready to live with darkness, with setbacks, tragedies, contradictions,
dilemmas, hypocrisies… and this requires from us both humility and patience,
perspective and wisdom. You will find some
of that teaching in the Book of Job for instance, and in the Psalms and Wisdom
writings. Today I want to look at that
second strand… darkness is not an adversary, it is not in itself evil. Dangerous perhaps…. and there are dangers also
in the daylight. Darkness, sang Simon
and Garfunkel, is an old friend. We are
familiar with dark places and dark times in our lives, as with old acquaintances,
along with blocked sinuses or the troublesome neighbour. Or the family’s or the church’s perennial
pain in the neck.
We emerged moreover from
darkness. It had been our habitat. We preferred it, initially -- it was the sudden
light that was the problem, and breathing air.
We had to learn smartly to cope with light and noise and people. (Some of us still have problems with
that…) So that seems to be the first
point, that we have an earlier and deeper affinity with the dark and, by a
slight leap of sense, with the dark times in life. There is no immediate need to avoid the dark,
to run away. Our modern culture has many
ways you can try to evade the dark, but it may be a bad decision. The darkness and the light in God’s creation
are mutually dependent. Both are present
in life and are meant to be. In the
Hebrew creation mythology, the darkness is there and God is there: Darkness
covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the
waters. Eventually God says, Let there be light.[1] And what God saw was good was the interplay
of light and darkness.
And so the Psalmist can say, Darkness is as light to you. God did not create the black evil of Auschwitz
– humans did that in defiance of God, some of them worshipping Christians. In the amazing Psalm 88, not a popular one,
the psalmist is sunk in darkness. By day I cried out – by night, in your
presence… His pain and sorrow are
real, but so, whether in darkness or in light, is God’s presence real. Robert Alter is a Jewish scholar steeped in
the rabbinic traditions, and I have his wonderful translation of the
Psalms. If you read this Psalm in most
English translations, it ends: You have
caused friend and neighbour to shun me; my companions are in darkness. Not so, says Robert Alter – and as a minor
Hebraist I agree -- that final Hebrew verse says: You distanced lover and neighbour from me. My friend (now) is darkness. Darkness, where God waits, is the friend remaining. Later writers have called this friend the
cloud of unknowing. St John of the
Crosss called it the Dark Night. Paul,
Augustine, Luther and countless others call it living by faith rather than by
sight and certainty. It is the darkness
of the inner room in our prayer when the door is shut, and we are silent and
imageless, yet in wonder, love and expectation.
To live by faith as Jesus taught is to find your way in the dark.
Learning how to wait. Finding fear starting
to melt away. Learning to love God amid
questions, contrary voices, mystery, and in our times, relentless secularism,
materialism, consumerism, hedonism. (Next
week, the other biblical metaphor of darkness…)
Preach the Gospel at all times, and – when necessary – use
words. (St Francis)
The gospel records make it
clear that there were times when Jesus had to be away on his own. He drew strength from solitude and
silence. And one of our major challenges
in this 21st century, in the secular culture in which God has placed
us, and in what’s left of a bothered, noisy chattering church, is not only to
find better ways of being a disciple, of loving God and the world – but of
finding words to describe this, at any rate to ourselves. The church scarcely has vocabulary, or ordered
mind, for expressing what we have to teach now – or else, the words it has are large
and technical. In this task one of the
helpers is Richard Rohr, American Franciscan friar. He reminds us that the silence is already
within. We don’t so much learn to be
still and silent, as that we find it there already, in stillness and silence,
at levels beyond all our worthy noise and activism. We locate the quiet space, the inner room,
where now we can learn to hear and see.
It is another way of knowing… it can be communicated with economy of
words.
The Latin contemplatio doesn’t mean thinking,
working it out, it means seeing what is there.
Our prayer, what Jesus called the inner room, is where we begin to see… as
we are setting to one side, for now, as we can, all our usual stuff, thought
and imaging and imagining, remembering, re-living, planning. Richard Rohr says this is a form of knowing
beyond reacting – emotion is set to one side.
For most of us that is quite a change – in our 21st century
culture emotion, “how do you feel…?” is paramount information… TVNZ regards
feelings as news. But we set aside, for
now, our thinking, working things out.
In Richard Rohr’s own words:
The soul does not use words. It surrounds words with
space, and that is what I mean by silence. Silence is a kind of wholeness. It
can absorb contraries, paradoxes, and contradictions. Maybe that is why we do
not like silence. There is nothing to argue about in true inner silence, and
the mind likes to argue. It gives us something to do. The ego loves something
it can take sides on. Yet true interior silence does not allow you to take
sides. That is one reason contemplation is so liberating and calming. There are
no sides to take and only a wholeness to rest in—which frees us to act on
behalf of love.[1]
I know very well how strange
that can sound. We are programmed to do
things, to react with how we feel or what we think, or what happened to us. We do it incessantly. Our reaction to dire things happening in the
world is to feel helpless, or at any rate, if we can, we do something. And God bless all those who do achieve things,
and all who try. Jesus invites us first
to listen and to see… to be wise. Wisdom
(σοφια) in Jesus’s
understanding came from stillness, silence, solitude, attention to God. So Mary of Bethany had chosen the better way,
he said. In the house of Simon the
Pharisee, when the distraught woman came in embarrassing them all, Jesus’s
words were, Do you see this woman…?[2] Of course they didn’t; what they saw was
an interruption, a nuisance and an intrusion… and an unauthorised female. It was Jesus who saw, from the silence of his
inner room, the woman God knew and loved.
