The cartoon strip Cathy provides my launching pad this morning. You know Cathy, the young woman with the bathing suit problem, who finds life always and ultimately troublesome. Cathy and her mother are preparing to go Christmas shopping. Mother: "Lists," Cathy "check - ads? Check. Coupons? Check. Ideas? Check. Charge cards? Check."
On their way out they pass Cathy's father, sleeping on the couch with a beatific smile on his totally relaxed and happy face. "Your father?"
"Checked out," says Cathy.
Mother: "Look at him lying there, so innocent, so oblivious."
Cathy: "Not a care in the world except how much of the football game he might drown out with his snoring."
Mother: "Is he panicked that he hasn't started Christmas shopping yet? No! Is he hysterical about the Christmas Cards, Christmas letters and Christmas baking? No!"
Cathy: "Is he worrying that the pie he's eaten for four days has obliterated all hopes of squashing into a new year's eve outfit? No!"
Mother: "What must it be like to be a man and have that peace?"
Cathy: "What must it feel like to be inside that brain?"
Suddenly, together they shout at him: "What's going on in there? Give us a clue! How can you live with yourself in that black hole of tranquillity?"
He leaps up sputtering, "Aack! What's wrong? What's happening?"
The two women walk on out, Mother saying to Cathy, "Our work is done here. Off to the mall!"
Cathy: "It always falls on the women to awaken the holiday spirit."
Apart from the deft and deadly humor, I was intrigued with one question in this feminine outburst: "How can you live with yourself in that black hole of tranquillity?" In science a black hole refers to a collapsed star from which neither light nor matter can escape; it is a great mystery, unseen even by the telescopic eye. Here, Cathy's father has obviously disappeared into a blessed state of bliss. A "Black hole of tranquillity" would seem a desirable mystery to enjoy in a time of year noted for rapid pace and harried haste.
Generally speaking blackness and darkness have negative connotations. We have Black Friday when the stock market collapsed, blackmailing, blackballing, the black market and the black arts. There is the dark night of the soul. The good guys wear white hats and the bad guys wear black ones. There is the Enlightenment and the Dark Ages.
In professional sports the Oakland Raiders usually wear black, to intimidate, and in fact are the most penalized team in the National Football League.
Even in church hymnody darkness is negative. The classic hymn by our own William Channing Gannett ends with the words, "and dawn becomes the morning, the darkness put to flight." In our new hymnal it reads "and night release its splendor that morning shall appear." In another hymn we "drive the dark of doubt away," doubt evidently being a bad thing, and urge the "giver of immortal gladness" to "fill us with the light of day," the light of day evidently being good. In the new hymnal, "dark of doubt" has been replaced with "the pain of doubt."
Kenneth Patton writes of darkness and light, preparing us for the cold and dark of winter which shall surely be followed by the warmth and brightness of spring. "In the midst of winter the promise is given of the summer season, and in the midst of darkness there comes the assurance of light."
For many the dark of winter is to be avoided - at worst it is awful, and at best to be tolerated until spring. Christmas and the attending holidays can be very traumatic tests of the human spirit. 'In the bleak midwinter" is a carol we will soon be learning.
While Christmas is supposed to be, and often is, a joyful time of family reunion, it also has the capacity to evoke memories of those we have loved and lost. This can be a very poignant time as these mixed messages crowd our minds. Sometimes our spirits reflect the apparent death of the year as vegetation seems overwhelmed by snow and ice and cold, and we are reminded of death, loss and attending grief. We may experience ourselves as religiously unmusical, unable to partake of the season's joy.
We even have a clinical diagnosis for our sagging spirits at this time of year - SAD - Seasonal Affective Disorder. Marked by acute depression, it is estimated that as many as one in four persons may suffer from it.
Symptoms include mood swings, changes in sleeping and eating patterns, low sex drive and stunted energy levels.
The world's religions have recognized this human tendency for despair at increasing darkness and have formulated symbol and ritual to deal with it. In late fall Hindus celebrate Divali, the festival of light, a New Year celebration at which lamps are ceremonially lit, housefronts are illuminated and presents are exchanged.
Jews celebrate the military victory of Judas Maccabeus over the oppressive Antiochus of Syria with the festival of Hanukkah - a lighting of candles for eight days to commemorate the mythical eternal candle.
And, of course, it is no coincidence that Christmas is celebrated in mid-winter to coincide with the Roman Feast of Saturnalia. What would Christmas be without candlelight against the darkness of Christmas Eve?
But do these ceremonies simply overcome our of fear of darkness by the appearance of light? Or is there a deeper meaning - that light and darkness, black and white, - are necessary to one another?
In Chinese cosmology we have the yin-yang circle divided by black and white tear shapes, each half containing a dot of the other color. This represents the identity and complimentary of opposites: good/evil, active/passive, positive/negative, light/dark, summer/winter, male/female. These powers are in tension but not flatly opposed. They balance each other, resolved by the circle that surrounds them.
One of our Unitarian Universalist musicians asks, "Is there no beauty in darkness? I ask this question for often times we sing and sometimes speak of beauty as colors bright, but is it light that brings beauty? Does not that beauty still shine when shadows fall and darkness comes? Is there no beauty in darkness? I ask this question."
It is a fair question and deserves answer. This portrayal of white as good and black as bad has been suggested as an archetypal cause of human racism. While this is an issue for another day, it was to respond to our denominational hymnbook commission's request for positive images of the dark that I wrote this morning's meditation, The Nourishing Dark.
There is something in me that loves, light, illumination, brightness of spirit. There is a T-shirt whose logos reads: "If all the world's a stage, I want better lighting."
Of course, we want everything to be clear; we tend to shun mystery, that which we cannot understand. But there is also something in me that loves the darkness, the mystery, the dark roots of life beneath the surface. We don't light the stage by turning on all the floodlights; instead, we arrange light and shadows into a subtle and pleasing whole.
I find light beautiful only as a complement to the darkness and vice versa.
Darkness is restful: the pause at the end of a busy day; the recuperative power of sleep. It is a contemplative time when life allows us to think undisturbed; it is the silence of the enveloping dark; it is part of the rhythm of the seasons and of life. At this turning time of year in the darkness, the earth is taking a rest, and so should we, spiritually speaking.
We need to pause in our manipulation of things and recognize our oneness with the earth and its dark subterranean power. Our need for this change of perspective, our need to reconnect with the mystery of the cosmos, is suggested in the story told by a theologian in the early years of satellites and space exploration.
He took his eleven year old into the yard under the night sky and pointed to the twinkling stars. "Which ones did we put up there?" the youngster asked. In a technologically advantaged world it is perhaps hard sometimes to realize that we have not made the earth and its elements which we so skillfully exploit.
The brilliance of stars on a dark winter night should cause us to pause and to wonder. Behold the stars - they are beautiful because of the darkness in which they burn.
We have the metaphor of "the speed of light," suggesting great rapidity. I suggest a contrasting metaphor, "the speed of darkness," suggesting a slowing of the rhythms of life - a welcome change of pace brought on by the more reflective darkness that pervades our world at this time of year.
In some seasons light and dark balance the day; in others light holds sway and we are glad; in still others darkness dominates and we are sometimes sad. It is the dark time of year. For some that is depressing, and we cannot wait for longer daylight hours. But for others darkness is a blessed time for reflection and contemplation, and we cherish the time.
My own feelings for the darkness are reflected in an amazing dream of which I read:
"I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock but it would not hold. Gravel gave way. I grasped for a shrub but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me. I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed. It is written in the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness."
Now is time to make our peace with the darkness - not just as an interval between seasons of nature or of the soul - but darkness for its own sake. It is the dark places that make for growth. As the Simon and Garfunkle sang in "The Sounds of Silence," "hello darkness, my old friend," we need to befriend the darkness.
I am affirmed in this view by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke:
You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!-
powers and people -
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.
I, too, have faith in nights. We began in darkness and it is to darkness we ultimately will return. I urge you to enjoy that darkness, not because it is followed by light, but for its own sake - for the rich mystery with which it confronts us. Darkness slows us down. We pause in the dark and wonder who we are and whither we go. Daylight has too many distractions for such contemplation. It is the night "veiled in mystery" that encourages our deepest probes into that "black hole of tranquillity."
"Blessed is the light which illumines our way; Blessed is the darkness which gives us rest."
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