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…)
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