Advent 2, Sunday 6 December 2020

Part two

Last week I reflected upon the theme of darkness. It’s perhaps a rather odd theme, because Advent and Christmas are all about light…light shining in the darkness. And, of course, we desire the light of love, compassion and justice to flow in and through us – light in darkness is a very powerful image. But what about meeting God in the dark? Can we also find a place for this imagery?

As I noted last week, “darkness” has been used as a synonym for sin, ignorance, and death – the Bible speaks of the powers of darkness. Which is why some churches tend to only emphasise the light - Barbara Brown Taylor in her book Learning to Walk in the Dark, describes these as full solar churches. Such churches tend to divide reality into opposing pairs: good/evil, church/world, spirit/flesh, light/dark. But the trouble starts when darkness falls on your life. This can happen in many unsurprising ways: you lose your job, your marriage falls apart, your health fails, you pray hard for something that doesn’t happen, A worldwide pandemic plunges us into lockdown, you begin to doubt your faith.

Darkness is often seen as evil and sinful - something to be avoided. But there is another dimension to darkness in the Bible. The word araphel means darkness, and it’s reserved for God’s exclusive use. This thick darkness reveals the divine presence even whilst obscuring it, the same way the brightness of God’s glory does. This experience or encounter with God is described beautifully in The Cloud of Unknowing, a section of which is included in your service sheet this evening.

You may be familiar with Teresa of Avila. She was the nun who helped reform the Carmelite tradition. She was deeply dissatisfied with her order. She lived in a convent with 200 others, but the wealthiest nuns had their own apartments which they shared with their relatives and servants. They had moved very far from the simple life of solitude and prayer.

Teresa decided to start a new convent closer to the original Carmelite ideal. Despite opposition, she founded the Monastery of St Joseph in Avila in 1562.

She found a male ally in the form John. Because he was so short, she called him ‘half a friar’ – he was less than five feet tall! He was 27 years her junior and a willing apprentice. He set up a Carmelite order of men.

However, the changes they were making didn’t go unnoticed and John’s superiors told him to stop. This he refused to do, so on the night of 2 December 1577, men broke into his room, abducted him and led him bound and blindfolded and threw him into the monastery prison. He survived on little more than water and bread. He wasn’t allowed to bathe or change his clothes. He only left his cell to be flogged by the other monks.

After two months he was placed in solitary confinement where the only light came from a slit in his prison wall. It was here that he composed his greatest work – The Dark Night of the Soul – helped by a friendly guard. After nine months, he managed to escape and fled to southern Spain.

Looking back on that hardship he endured, he spoke about it with great joy. For him, the dark night is a love story, full of the painful joy of seeking the most elusive lover of all.

Many other Christians have experienced such dark nights of the soul. It’s not something one chooses; the dark night descends. And when it does, the reality that troubles the soul most is the apparent absence of God. If God is light, then God is gone. It includes a profound wrestling with belief.

One of the central functions of the dark night, he says, is to convince those who grasp after things, that God cannot be grasped. In John’s native Spanish, his word for God is nada. God is not a thing. And since God is not a thing, God cannot be held on to. God can only be encountered. He teaches by saying what God is not, hoping to convince us that our images of ‘God’ are in fact obstacles between us and the Real Thing.

I wonder if you have had, or are having, such an experience.

St John of the Cross’ advice is to remain conscious, to stay with the moment in which God seems most absent, and slowly, if uncomfortably, the night will do the rest. Something you can’t imagine, a faith that is different and new, will emerge from the experience.

If that relates to darkness grappling with belief, there is another dimension to darkness…, ‘dark emotions’, such as grief, fear, anger and despair. I picked up from my Western culture that such emotions should be repressed, shut up and not engaged with.

In her book, Healing Through The Dark Emotions, the psychologist Miriam Greenspan says that when we can’t tolerate the dark, we try all kinds of artificial lights. These can include things like drugs, alcohol, shopping, shallow sex, and hours in front of the television or computer. However, Greenspan says that there are no dark emotions, just unskilful ways of coping with emotions we cannot bear. This may sound terribly un-English, but letting the emotions flow – even the loud and messy ones – is important. Because if they are suppressed, they can harden like plaque in a coronary artery, blocking anything else that tries to come through.

If you’ve been brought up to deal with painful emotions by simply suppressing them, it can be very challenging to reconfigure learning to sit with them instead.

Eruptions of emotions, whilst uncomfortable, are good news. It signals that darkness will not stay buried. They can actually be conduits of pure energy, waking us up, telling us something we need to know. They can break the ice around our hearts, and move us to act. If you can stand the upsetting energy, you may be allowed to watch while dark and light come back into balance.

In conclusion, how might we live in both the light and the dark. How might we find God in all our experiences and emotions – whether light or dark?

Well, maybe we need to recognise that the light and dark exist with and within each other. Having a mature grown up faith is one in which dark and light, faith and doubt, divine absence and presence, do not exist at opposite poles. Instead, they exist together. We cannot have one without the other. Just as night will always follow day and the sun will rise again at the end of the dark night, so is our journey through life. And our calling is to seek God in everything – in all we see and do, in all we feel – God is calling us to encounter him. And perhaps this Advent, at this dark time of year, we can start to practice finding God in the dark as well as the light. And if we do, maybe the dark will be a little less scary, as we trust our loving Father to lead us through.

Here then is the testimony of faith: darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day.

Reference: Learning to Walk in the Dark, by Barbara Brown Taylor

You are wisdom, uncreated and eternal,
the supreme first cause, above all being,
sovereign Godhead, sovereign goodness,
watching unseen the God-inspired wisdom of Christian people.
Raise us, we pray, that we may totally respond
to the supreme, unknown, ultimate, and splendid height
of your words, mysterious and inspired.
There all God's secret matters lie covered and hidden
under darkness both profound and brilliant, silent and wise.
You make what is ultimate and beyond brightness
secretly to shine in all that is most dark.
In your way, ever unseen and intangible,
you fill to the full with most beautiful splendour
those souls who close their eyes that they may see.
And I, please, with love that goes on beyond mind
to all that is beyond mind,
seek to gain such for myself through this prayer.

St. Denis, From The Cloud of Unknowing, 14th century