This sermon was delivered at the North Shore Unitarian Universalist Church in Lacombe, LA, on January 22, 2017.
Late December would be the optimum time for this sermon. Here, only a month past the Winter Solstice, we are already noticing the lengthening days. We’re gardening, and working and playing outside in the sunshine. We are, for the most part, sighted beings. We can apprehend information at a great distance, using our eyes and tools to assist them. We can see very tiny things with the help of sophisticated visual aids. We light the darkness, trying to do away with shadows entirely, so insistent are we that everything be visible at all times. And our reluctance, if not outright terror, of facing the darkness plays out beyond the physical world. We harm ourselves and all of creation by failing to recognize the intrinsic value of darkness. As children, many of us were afraid of the dark. In the dark, the familiar disappeared or was transformed into something foreign and threatening. If we were lucky, our parents accompanied us into the dark, perhaps sitting quietly in a chair by the bed, or even better, taking us out into the wild darkness of the countryside, a farm or a campground – an unlit campground. As we experienced our parents’ comfort with the dark, our own grew. Or our parents responded to our fear of the dark by leaving the door open with the hallway light on, or providing a nightlight of our very own, without which we would not close our eyes, and this did nothing to ameliorate our fear of the dark. When I started my research on this topic, I thought I was entering fairly new territory, at least pertaining to bringing a number of concepts of darkness together. Along the way, though, I found several books on the topic, including a book of essays edited by Paul Bogard and titled Let There Be Night, in which James Bremner talks about how he was “mightily afraid of the dark as a child.” Bremner lived in a small village in western Scotland where there were no wild animals or known criminals. But there were also no streetlights or porch lights, which meant that once night fell, the darkness was absolute. Every evening, it fell to him to take the family’s empty milk bottles down to the bottom of the driveway so the milkman could swap them out next morning. He experienced a deep level of fear every evening. The driveway was only about a hundred yards long, but from the house it disappeared into complete blackness almost at once. James walked slowly into the darkness, laden with the glass milk bottles, only to place them carefully and dash back to the perceived safety of the house. Throughout childhood, the darkness terrified him. Every single night it took all the courage he had. But while his fear of the dark may have been baseless, the bravery it drew out of him stayed with him for the rest of his life. “Courage,” he writes now, “which is no more than the management of fear, must be practiced. For this, children need a widespread, easily obtained, cheap, renewable source of something scary but not actually dangerous. Darkness,” he says, fits that bill.” Before we delve further into the spiritual aspects of darkness, though, let’s take a quick look at physical darkness and how its lack affects our world’s health. Barbara Brown Taylor, once an Episcopal priest, now the author of Learning to Walk in the Dark, tells a story of a beached sea turtle who had come ashore to lay her eggs. Programmed by nature to seek the horizon when she was finished in order to find her way back to the sea, she was confused by the lighted horizon of the nearby mainland and went the wrong way. This turtle was lucky. Compassionate people came upon her, contacted authorities, and got her back to the water while she was still able to respond. But how many turtles are affected like this, and what will happen to sea turtle populations when the mothers die on the shore? And what about the babies, “wired to scramble toward the ocean while seabirds and ghost crabs pick off the stragglers, but … subject to the same confusion as their mother. What hope did the turtles have, with their navigational system made obsolete by humans?” Birds are also affected by the brilliance of our towns and cities, interfering with their navigation as they migrate. Certain types of birds are more affected than others, but it is a pervasive problem. Other nocturnal and crepuscular animal populations are affected, as well, and people (a diurnal species) are starting to become more aware of the effects of computer light on our ability to sleep well. Some are swearing off their digital devices and even televisions after a certain hour of the evening and returning to practices that prepare them for sleep. But, once again quoting Taylor, “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.” Since night is the time when our bodies repair themselves, confusing the messages means that we don’t get the level of repair we need. “The effects of chronic sleep deprivation include elevated blood pressure and blood glucose levels, depression of the immune system, increased risk of ulcers and heart disease, memory loss, and heightened appetite. Every nuclear accident in the world has happened on the night shift. So did the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, driver fatigue is responsible for 100,000 accidents and 1,500 deaths every year. One study found that medical interns working through the night were twice as likely to misread hospital test results, increasing the possibility of making poor decisions for their patients. The divorce rate of night workers is 10 percent higher than the national average. The risk of breast cancer rises 50-70 percent for women who work night shifts.” It seems like such a small thing, doesn’t it? Lighting the darkness? How can this have such devastating effects on our lives and our world? We 21st Century people have trouble viewing ourselves as animals, but we still are. We are creatures of nature, and Nature will have her way. Overlighting our darkness is just another way we try to control Nature. We think that, the more light we have in our yards, along our streets, and into every shadowy alley, the safer we will be. Yet preliminary studies show that there is actually an increase in crime in areas where lighting is increased. Perhaps people feel safer because of increased lighting and leave their homes to go into ill-advised areas. Perhaps more people are able to see crimes being committed. Whatever the reason, an increase in light does not equal a decrease in crime. Given the statistics on our own health and the planet’s, perhaps it’s time to consider why we have done this in the first place, and what we can do about it. The Christian paradigm presents duality: good and evil, light and dark. And light is nearly always equated with good, dark with evil. This is where it begins. The Bible is full of passages that reflect this: Matthew: 4:16: The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned. Light, good. Dark equates to death, and death is bad. Matthew: 5:16: Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. Light, good. Glorify the Father by showing your good works with light. John: 1:5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. We don’t want darkness to win! John: 8:12 Again Jesus spoke to them saying, “I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Don’t walk in darkness! There are many of these passages throughout the Bible, Old and New Testaments, and as much as those of us who no longer ascribe to a strict Christian mythos might argue, our Western culture is largely based on these ideas. Surprisingly, though, the Bible also ascribes holiness to darkness. God speaks out of a cloud, converses with people in the night, and sends angels to speak messages both of hope and wonder and of warning in the darkness. Taylor suggests that the concept of God is necessarily obscured. It is beyond our complete comprehension. She relates that a monk named Gregory of Nyssa speaks of Moses as follows: “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.” Taylor continues: “If we decide to keep going beyond the point where our eyes or minds are any help to us, we may finally arrive at the pinnacle of the spiritual journey toward God, which exists in complete and dazzling darkness.” So we live in a culture that worships the light. That doesn’t even sound weird, does it? It’s what we’re supposed to do: worship the light, go toward the light, reach enlightenment. But these concepts do us a disservice when they prevent us from relishing the darkness, learning its lessons, and resting peacefully in the world in which we find ourselves, a world – perhaps even a God – made up of light and darkness and everything in between. Think back on the blindness exercise we did earlier. Could you imagine yourself trying to make your way around an area you could not see at all? For those few minutes, did you sense fear? Anxiety? And was there a sense of relief when you could finally remove your blindfold and see again? So let’s go back for a moment. You can put your blindfold back on, if you like, or just close your eyes. But even with eyes closed, become aware of how much light comes in. Listen to the sound of my voice. Do you hear anything in it that you didn’t hear before? Is it harder or easier to understand what I’m saying? Let your other senses open up. Feel the chair and the floor supporting you. Do you feel the energy of the people around you, especially those closest to you? Are you aware of any sounds that you weren’t before? I’m going to give you a few moments to take it all in. … Here we are. Back again. You may open your eyes or remove your blindfolds, or you may keep them closed, if you like. If we ignore and prevent the dark around us, what more are we doing with the darkness within us? And isn’t this, perhaps, where all fear of darkness originates? Back to our dualistic perception of the world: where there is darkness there is not light. Where there is light there is not darkness. That is the perception of someone who sees the world in black and white. We know, consciously, that there are many shades of grey between the white and the black, and between the light of day and the dark of night. So are there, too, shades and gradations within our perceptions of ourselves. And when we begin to perceive God as embodying (so to speak) all of what we discern as good and evil, light and dark, our own dark becomes more livable. What is in the dark? We don’t know. We can’t see. And so we must open ourselves up to mystery, to living with questions, not answers. Preceding the words of our Responsive Reading, in Kathleen Dean Moore’s essay, she says, Mystery opens the human spirit to what is beyond it. Encountering that mystery gives a person a sort of “night vision” of the imagination. Night vision, the ability to see in the dark, is strengthened by darkness, and quickly destroyed by light. And isn’t this true of imagination as well, nourished by mystery and diminished by the glare of certainty and human pride? But there’s more. Darkness feeds a sense of wonder, a young person’s great gift—astonishment at a world alive with marvels. The world is half the time in darkness; this is a fact of the great spinning Earth. When we protect children from darkness, when we dim or destroy it with artificial light, we shut them off from fully half the human experience of what is wonderful. When we limit children to those worlds they can see, we risk closing them to worlds they can only hear or smell or feel against their skin. This is an offense against exhilaration and joy. Blessed is the person who holds a childhood memory of that first night sleeping in the backyard –the heavy dew, the smell of mown grass, headlights sweeping the hedges, crickets suddenly still. When I was in high school, I used to sneak out at night. Outwardly, it seemed this was just to meet up with friends, and party; but when I was moving from shadow to shadow on foot, hiding behind bushes when I saw a car coming (there was a curfew for school-age people), and simply being awake at a secret time when most people were sleeping, I experienced the exhilaration Moore is talking about. It’s not quite as exciting now, since I’m too old for a curfew, but I still float on a different level when I walk late at night. I feel the breath of the air inside me, and I sense all the molecules of everything in the world dancing through me. Things are too hard-edged during the day to indulge in this kind of fancy. In snowy places, the night air and starlight twinkle on the drifts and fields. Here, the fog and mist move. This wouldn’t be a proper sermon if I didn’t offer some thoughts on what to do about our lack of darkness. In the physical world, we need to advocate for the darkness by shielding our outdoor lights so that they are directed specifically, not spilling outward in all directions, creating domed glow and artificial horizons. This can be done at our own homes with our porch lights and back yard lights. But we can also advocate for it within our communities. Streetlights and parking lot lights can be shielded so that they only shine downward. Imagine what a difference it would make to night-migrating birds if, in flying over a city, there were only pinpoints of light and perhaps a glow on the ground, rather than a huge radiating dome of light, looking for all the world like daytime. And we can take the time to experience true physical darkness. I looked up the darkest places in Mississippi and Louisiana, and there is a site, and a chart. You can find this information at cleardarksky.com. According to the charts, there are only about 4 places between the two states that are really free from artificial light. We might have more luck out west, on the top of a mountain. I don’t know, but I’m going to try to find out. Even when I camped on the side of a mountain in Northeastern California last summer, there was a glow of light from the nearby small town, and from Sacramento further away. But I could see the Milky Way. And I wouldn’t have been able to do that in Los Angeles. In experiencing a night without artificial light, we are bound to discover that the night isn’t completely dark. Even starlight casts shadows. And the moon, in its larger phases, is downright illuminating, but still in a mysterious way, a way that the sun can’t ever match. As we open ourselves up to physical darkness, I hope we will also open ourselves to spiritual darkness. This doesn’t mean “bad” stuff. Even the “dark night of the soul” has deep benefit for the spirit. And here’s the ultimate takeaway for us and the world. If we can accept darkness—no, more than accept it—welcome it, celebrate it, and be exhilarated by it, perhaps we as a species can grow away from demonizing people who are dark. Every culture does it, even communities within smaller cultures. Those who are darker are less. Those who are darker are more dangerous, threatening, and frightening. Black cats. Black people. Black shadows. Fear. Darkness. Dispel the beliefs. Embrace the darkness. See it in its place as part of all that is. Blessed be.
1 Comment
Janet Talbot
1/27/2017 10:17:50 pm
I was intrigued by your light v dark comments while we visited tonight and found the sermon you mentioned. The highest compliment I can is give is this; it really made me think. Thank you for providing a new wrinkle in my brain! Lights out now.
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