“Holy darkness, blessed night, heaven's answer hidden from our sight. As we await you, O God of silence, we embrace your holy night.” –Dan Schutte, “Holy Darkness”
Last December I fell in love with walking in the dark in my suburban neighborhood.
I was six months out from a hip replacement, not quite fully healed, feeling stuck in my recovery and so I decided to take a daily walk at day’s end. My hope was that by getting up from the couch and getting outdoors and using my brand-new hip, the lingering pain and stiffness might finally be gone. And I did get better, step by step.
But the real revelation of those journeys after sundown, and all the endless circles I walked in my cul-de-sac laden neighborhood, was my discovery of just how beautiful the dark finally is, especially December dark. Like the dark that contains the glow of moonlight on a full moon night. The dark that surrounds all the colorful holiday lights on house after house after house, blinking and bursting forth in mellow whites and colorful reds and greens and blues and yellows. How sublime is the darkness I see in an ink black night sky that takes my breath away, so many stars spilled across the sky like a bucket of milk, like a milky way. I love the dark that embraces the one light in my living room, a quiet light that shines down into the street and reminds me that I am almost home again.
If you are into the dark, this is your time of year.
Just this week, on the 21st day, was winter solstice, at 10:59 am Eastern Standard Time. At that exact moment, the sun was at its farthest southerly point in its angle towards the earth, hence the shortness of the day: sunrise at 7:10 am, sunset at 4:15 pm. Just nine hours, four minutes, and thirty-five seconds of light. The next day we gained two seconds and began our long journey back into the light, which will peak on summer solstice, next June 21st when we will bask in more than 15 hours of the light.
This is where I’m supposed to kvetch about the dark and the cold of December. It’s almost a cliché in these parts of the world to complain about the winter and the dark and the snow and to pine for summer and the light, and the sun. I might have done so in years’ past but this December? I say bring on the dark. I say celebrate the dark. I say love the dark.
The dark gets a bad and undeserved rap in our culture and language. The bad guy always wears a dark hat, and the dark is where nefarious folks hang out to do their dark deeds. The dark is about shadows, places we can’t see and therefore are supposed to be afraid of. Bruce Springsteen laments about “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and Batman is so threatening as the Dark Knight and…well you get the picture. The dark always seems to be seen as malevolent. Bad. Look up the word “dark” in a dictionary and almost all the synonyms for it are downright, well, dark: dingy, gloomy, dire, and dreadful, to name but a few.
But the dark…it is where we spend the first nine months of our lives, in the darkness of our mother’s womb. It’s in the dark where God shapes us, where we come to be as human beings. Before the world was, it was first full of darkness and without form, as the Bible notes. No dark. No creation. No life. The dark is where we will spend half of our lives, in the night, in the twilight. Nature needs the dark: more than 60 percent of invertebrate and 30 percent of vertebrate creatures are nocturnal, and hunt, forage and live in the dark. And in my faith tradition, three wise men from the east needed a dark night sky with one blazing star up above, to find a little baby who would grow up to change the world forever.
December dark.
Maybe instead of seeing this time of year as a burden or something to be put up with on the way to “blessed” spring and summer, perhaps we might reconsider. See the darkness as our friend. Explore the darkness and discover what we might not have paid attention to before. So, this month, I say, thank you December, for the dark. Thank you for inviting us in. The light will return soon enough, but for now?
Who wants to take a walk?
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