What feelings arise in you when you think about darkness? Barbara Brown Taylor asks that question in a podcast series called “The Treasures of Darkness.” She points out the disquieting relationship many of us have with darkness thanks to both cultural and religious forces in our lives.
My relationship with darkness has evolved over the years. As a child, I was terribly afraid of the dark. I couldn’t walk down the hallway of my childhood home without turning on the light even though there was nothing in the hallway that might be a hazard. I have no idea where that fear of the dark came from, but as life went on, I was taught many reasons to avoid the dark. Bad things happen in dark places. Cultural and religious metaphors tend to pit light and dark against one another with light being good and dark being bad. I absorbed those teachings just as most of us have.
Yet, I was also fascinated by the dark – at least by the dark of the night. It was in this darkness that mystery entered my life. The cosmos was mysterious and beautiful. The stars were a source of wonder to me. What existed beyond the boundaries of this earth and its atmosphere? I wondered. As my relationship with God developed, that sense of mystery deepened, and I have come to see that God is there in the darkness.
In Psalm 18:11, the psalmist describes this mystery in poetry and praise saying that “God make darkness cloak him.” This psalm speaks of the terrifying nature of our wild and untamable God, of a God we cannot fully comprehend or understand. Yet the psalmist finds comfort in this image of God, and so, I believe, should we.
That is one of the great challenges of this life: to learn to accept and find comfort in the unknowability of God, to realize that God is more than we can know and that any idea about God we may have is at best partial and at worst completely wrong. And so, we must hold our image of God lightly, willing to admit that there is much about God we cannot know.
This is why humility is essential in our faith journey. To believe that we have put God safely into a box, to think that we can control who God is and how God will behave, is a dangerous thing – much like the old-fashioned pressure cooker my mother would reluctantly pull out on those occasions when she was expected to make jelly out of the tiny crabapples gifted to us by the tree in our front yard. God will, eventually, blow the lid off our silly box and show us how little we do understand about God. At such times our reactions will say more about us than about God.
- We may choose to stand in awe and amazement, accepting our ignorance and rejoicing in this God who is cloaked in darkness.
- We may choose to run away, either fearing the untamable God or finding a false sense of safety in the belief that God does not exist.
- Or, we may choose to “gird up our loins” and tackle that exploding box with the foolish determination that we will! get that lid back on no matter the cost!
Only the first response allows us to encounter the grace of darkness. Only in our willingness to accept God as God chooses to be will we be able to draw closer to the mystery, closer to the sense of unity with God in which we do find comfort. This is why the darkness of God is grace, for in it we will encounter God – the true God, and not the tamed excuse of a god we cling to when we refuse to accept the mystery, the unknowability, of God.
It takes courage to enter the darkness even when it is the darkness of God. Yet in the entering we learn that darkness can be very, very good and so we have nothing to fear.
Rev. Joyce Day
If you would like to view past editions of Grace for the Journey, follow this link: https://sounddistrictnc.org/category/grace-for-the-journey/