“Though my soul may rise in darkness, it
will rise in perfect light. I have loved the stars too fondly, to be fearful of
the night.” --Sarah Williams, 1868
Five a.m., give or take a few minutes, depending upon
how many times I hit the snooze button on my alarm clock. That’s the time I arise every Sunday morning
to prepare for my biggest work day of the week. Most of the natural year, save
for a handful of weeks at the height of summer, this time is marked by little
or no light outdoors in the pre-dawn, save for the streetlamps or the stars in
the sky or a pale yellow moon.
In the dark.
All is quiet save for a few souls who accompany me in
welcoming that darkness. There’s the Mom driving kids to hockey, an early
morning runner quietly passing by with her breath billowing out in chilly
clouds and a nurse who has the early shift at the hospital and sips her coffee
and imagines the day ahead. When I was kid, I fell into this routine of getting
up in the dark because it was my job to awaken as early as 4 a.m. and deliver
the morning newspapers. Maybe that’s why I still so love the dark, the night,
the evening, the shadows, the hushed quiet, when seemingly everyone else is
asleep, but I get to be up.
In the dark.
Which we must confess gets a pretty bad rap in this
life from most humans. The dark. The dusk. The gloom. “Who knows what evil
lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!!” That introduction to an old
1930’s radio show pretty much sums up how most of us view the darkness. It is a
place of the unknown, of mystery and fear, of something or someone who lurks,
waiting to threaten us and all because we cannot see them, hidden as they are,
and why?
Well, it’s dark.
The shady superhero Batman is always called the Dark
Knight. Bruce Springsteen sings of “Darkness on the Edge of Town” as a place
where he confronts his worst demons, in the dark, of course. As kids it was the
dark forbidding space in the closet across the room or the darkness under the
bed that scared us the most: hence the need for a nightlight. “Dark Shadows”
scared us all as a cheesy vampire soap opera that ran on TV in the 1960’s.
According to the Merriam-Websters Dictionary, there
are at least 143 synonyms for dark and some 284 other “dark” related words and
a quick run through that list reveals not one positive word or association. There’s
dim, murky, obscure, somber, and dull to name but a few. Add in bad, nefarious,
evil, immoral, rotten and sinful and the trend is clear. We humans, even after millions of years of
existence—we’ve yet to make peace with the dark.
But in December, especially in late December in the
Northern Hemisphere, the truth is we have no choice. On the 21st we
experience the absolute darkest time of year, winter solstice, when the sun is
tilted most far away from mother earth and so on that day, nature barely ekes
out nine hours of sunlight. Even the light that does show up is still kind of
dark: winter light, so often diffuse, muted, flat even.
Still, I’ve grown to love the dark.
Maybe it’s because I remember we humans actually lived
in the dark for the first nine months of life, in the warm and enveloping
waters of the maternal womb. Maybe it’s because I love all the outside lights
that my neighbors display in December, everything from one, simple illuminated
candle in the window to over the top displays of blinking lights, thousands of
lights, covering whole yards and even whole houses, blazing and twinkling in
reds and greens and whites and blues. Our holiday lights would not be as
special or beautiful if we had 24/7 sunshine.
No. We need the dark to love the light.
Even the sacred and holy tales we tell ourselves this
time of year: without the dark of night, they’d never have happened. And so,
the story is told of three astrologers from the east 2,000 years ago, who used
just one star in the night to make a long, long trip across deserts and
valleys, all to visit a baby king. And so, the story is told of a faithful
people who defeated an occupying army and when they went to the Temple to light
a holy menorah, even though there was only enough oil for one night, the light
blazed on for eight nights. And so, Creation itself could not have come into
being if not first for the darkness, the void, from which everything came
forth.
Even as some speak of living in dark times now, as a
nation and a world, even then this darkness can be seen as a gift, for at its
best, the dark inspires us to push back against it. Push back against the bad
times and the bad news and instead light and live just one candle of hope. That’s
all it takes to pierce the darkness. Just one light. In the darkest days we remember times past
when our forebears somehow survived the dark and emerged into the light. They embraced and moved through the dark.
We
can too.
So, we thank you December, for the dark. For the
contrast it offers. For the beauty it embodies in just one star shining bright
in a black night sky. For the hope it challenges us to have as humans,
especially before the sun comes up.
We of the dark. We of the light.
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