In general, I don’t like travelling alone. I do it for work, and have done it for many jobs over the years, but I never like it. The only exception started the first time I was away from home as a parent. That very first night when I turned off the lights, and it was dark. And quiet. That felt like a gift. My room at home never really gets that dark and with the rest of my family – two dogs included – stillness and quiet aren’t all that common either. It happened again in Glasgow. My days were loud, long, and exhausting. At night I fell into bed so grateful to be able to go to sleep. More than a few of those nights, I turned off the lights and leaned into the luxury of the dark. My eyes, my body, my spirit could rest. I felt enveloped, held, somehow cared for, even healed by the dark.
We are two days from Winter Solstice. This week, we have about 9 hours of light each day and 16 hours of dark. I admit, when my alarm goes off at 6am and it’s completely dark outside, I don’t want to get out of bed. I know I have to. School starts at 7:20, I need to get to work, and there isn’t even an extra 5 minutes under the blankets after the dogs are up. I’m betting this experience isn’t unique to me. The dark is inviting. It’s comforting. It invites and entices us to rest. And, while many of us experience it that way, culturally, we have assigned value to the word “dark” that doesn’t reflect that, nor does it help us build a world grounded in equity and inclusion.
Language, the way we talk about things, alters the way we understand them. A study was done about ten years ago introducing two metaphors for crime. Each subject was given an article talking about rising crime. The first talked about crime as a beast and the other used the metaphor of a virus. The rest of the articles were the same, each citing the same statistics. It was just the image that changed. The people given the image of a beast wanted to respond with more police, stricter laws, longer sentences. The people given the image of a virus wanted to institute more education, stronger social programs, and policies to address systemic injustice. The metaphor altered the potential responses.
Metaphors are sometimes so embedded they define culture. The one I’m finding most distracting lately is light as good and dark as bad. We’re so enculturated to it, “evil” is actually the second definition for dark in Webster’s Dictionary. The first is “absence of light” but the second is a metaphor. We have so many examples of this good-bad metaphor it’s difficult to get away from them. If someone is “in the dark” they don’t have information. If you “shed light” on a situation, you’re helping everyone to understand it. Evidence “comes to light” to help us all find truth. If someone is shady, they aren’t to be trusted. The dark side of your character is the part that needs to change or hide. When someone is helpful or useful, they might be described as a “ray of light”, or maybe a “shining example”. If you’re unhappy, you’re in a “dark place” or if something went wrong in the past it was a “dark time in history”. The light of your life is someone you love and a light at the end of the tunnel is always a good thing. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.” That’s from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Gandhi said, “In the midst of darkness, light persists.” And Amanda Gorman said, “For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.”
In some places, these metaphors might be harmless, but in this country, with racism so deeply embedded in our educational, health, military, economic, criminal, and social systems, unearthing the implications and, even more, altering our use of such language, could yield helpful, justice-making results. The author Richard Watkins suggests some alternatives. How about light as public and dark as private. Or light as work and dark as rest. Light as plutonic and dark as romantic. Light as noise and dark as quiet. Letting go of the impulse to quantify light as good and dark as bad opens us to rich possibility. It’s possible to praise the light without disparaging the dark. Both are required. Let’s break it open and find more ways of rolling around in and delighting in the possibility of language.
The poet Kristen Harper wrote a book called The Darkness Divine in which she wrote this poem:
God resides in the depths of darkness
As in the light of sunbeams.
The moon shines brighter surrounded by night
And life is secure in the black waters of the womb.
As the night sky littered with stars demonstrates again and again,
There is beauty in darkness and beauty in light-
One no more brilliant then the other,
One no more necessary than the other,
One always complementing the other.
Without the heated darkness of the Universe,
Spitting neutrons, electrons, and protons from atoms,
Life and light would never be.
The task for us today
Is to recognize God in both-
To see the divine in the rich brown earth,
The textured black walnut,
As well as the white snow and the pale pink jellyfish.
To see the sacred in the panther and the swan.
To embrace the dignity of the Black Madonna,
As it is embodied in the Virgin Mary.
The task for us today
Is to look into the multifaceted colors of the onyx
And see the miraculous spectrum of color
Produced in the prism of a diamond.
This isn’t about light or dark being better than the other, but about embracing, even loving, both. A study was once done with the core question coming from the reality of Americans experiencing Seasonal Affective Disorder generally understood to be feelings of depression brought on by the lack of sunlight. The researcher wondered why this was common in the United States, but less common in Norway, a country that experiences much longer and darker winters. One of the key findings was that cultures that experience a lack of light for a long time embrace that as a good and welcome thing. Culturally, Norwegian people look forward to the dark. They welcome the cold and snow. They don’t seek to get away from it, but to move their lives even more outdoors so as to experience it. That cultural difference creates the possibility of joy during long, dark winters, rather than dread. We have a choice about how we think, about what we embrace, and that choice can recast our lives and possibly our society.
Darkness is where all life begins. In the womb. It’s creative, generative, powerful. Black is the presence of all color, the holding of all things beautiful. In the beginning, there was darkness. It is the fullest embrace of everything, the holding of all potential. A theology of Blackness would espouse comfort, romance, rest. We could lean into the dark, let it hold us, fulfill us, and inspire us. Rather than something to eliminate, we can seek it. Reassigning dark to a place of necessity, of good, of life-giving, helps us break down the dualisms that oversimplify the complexity of human existence. Dualism is actually an ancient Christian heresy. It’s the idea that the soul is good and the body is bad. Those metaphors extended to include soul, male, light, sun as opposed to body, female, dark, moon. These associations are so embedded in our thinking, it feels nearly impossible to dislodge them. I’m not suggesting we do that. I’m suggesting we simply purge ourselves of the value judgement attached to each. No longer a world divided in two, we can reconstruct it as a whole, fully embodied, light and dark in concert.
This solstice season, let’s embrace the dark in gratitude and accept the invitation to recast the world. We’ll close with another poem by Kristen Harper:
In the beginning, there was darkness, a blackness that covered all,
Comprising the building blocks of creation-
The nutrients and nurturing needed to birth the world.
This dark womb pushed out the light that released the heavens
And cradled the planets and stars adorning the universe;
It formed the darkened earth from which all life emerged
And to which all life returns when our bodies take their final breath.
It is the same darkness that shelters us from an unrelenting sun;
That calls animals to a safe hibernation;
That protects the germination of seed and bulb.
Darkness signals an end to the hectic chaos of our days,
And lulls us to sleep and revitalization so that we can face the next challenge.
There is peace in darkness, and mystery, and the unknown,
And if we can rest in its grace, cease fighting to control it,
We must might see in it the face of God.