Groping Around in the Dark
In a world where being sure about everything is the way of life, embracing mystery can be incredibly difficult. Unfortunately (or fortunately), there are many aspects of our life to be gleaned in those dark places, so we shouldn’t forsake them.
It’s easy to feel that life would be so much easier if we could just know everything clearly and be able to define every occurrence accurately without having to take time for interpretation. If we could know ourselves without all of the soul-searching and contemplation, wouldn’t life be so much better? I don’t think so.
Those walks in the dark where the ambiguity is the rule and not the exception, are transformative. Barbara Brown Taylor said that “I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.” Groping our way around in the darkness teaches us things about the world and ourselves that seeing them in the light never could.
During Lent, we learn to embrace the darkness so that we can appreciate the light. That faint glimmer of sunshine that pierces through the gap between the stone and the cave wall is not a reassurance that we will be saved from the darkness, but rather a reminder that the darkness is good, too. Light and dark need each other to exist.
When Thomas Merton was starting his writing career and making his early attempts at being a novelist, some of the beauty that would emerge from embracing the spiritual writing that he was best at shone through. In this excerpt, Merton is having a conversation with a couple of Gestapo officers in London through the window of a bombed out house as he writes. They ask him why he writes and he replies that it is so he can learn about the world and himself. The officers then inquire as to whether it would just be faster to see things clearly from the beginning and that writing to figure things out would lead to many volumes of wasted paper and meaningless books. Merton’s reply was:
No doubt. But if I if it were all clear at once, I would not really understand it,
either. Some things are too clear to be understood, and what you think
is your understanding of them is only a kind of charm, a kind of incantation in your mind concerning that thing. This is not understanding: it is something you remember. So much for definitions! We always have to go back and start from the beginning and make over all the definitions for ourselves again.
Even the things that can be seen clearly in the light aren’t always what they seem to be: scripture, the actions of another, our own lives, even. It’s in the overcoming of the discomfort and the dis-ease of our own being that we finally start to reach out in the dark without fearing the monster that may lie waiting beyond our fingertips. It’s in those moments when we really get to know the world as it really is.
Apophatica 
April 1, 2019 at 8:33 am
Amen Brandyn!
This reminds me of David Whyte’s poem Sweet Darkness:
When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn…
…anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
…is too small for you.
– “Sweet Darkness” by David Whyte, House of Belonging