Darkness Is as Light to You

(Psalm 139:7-12)

Even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you. —Psalm 139:12

We were deep underground. The cave tour had been interesting, and at times breathtakingly beautiful, but it was soon to become disorienting. We were gathered together in the middle of an incredible open space. The ceiling of the chamber stretched far overhead, and the walls were almost out of sight. It was hard to believe that we were actually underground. That is, until they turned off the lights. The darkness didn't come as a surprise. The guides had warned us in advance what was going to happen. For our safety, they cautioned us not to move about in the dark, and they promised us that they would not leave the lights off for very long.

I don't normally have a great fear of the dark but I had never encountered darkness like this before. Once the lights went off, there was absolutely no light. There were no shadows, no areas of deeper or lighter black. There were no faint outlines, and no matter how much I strained my eyes, I could see absolutely nothing. It was as if I had been swallowed by the darkness. With nothing to touch, nothing to hold onto, I felt as if I were teetering on the edge of a cliff. I could almost imagine that I was in freefall, even though my feet were firmly planted on the rock beneath me. I don't know how long they left us in darkness but I suspect that it wasn't very long. When the lights came back on, the whole group began chattering. The relief at being able to see was intense.

Complete darkness is rare. In these days of security lights, flashlights, streetlights, and car headlights, darkness has almost been banished. Few of us experience the darkness that makes it possible to study the stars or to see the Milky Way on a regular basis. Most of the time, we can ignore the dark, yet many of us have a deep-seated fear of the darkness, a fear that has been mitigated, but not banished, by our ever-present electric lights. True darkness has become unfamiliar to us, and perhaps because of that it is all the more frightening.

Darkness, however, doesn't have to be so terrifying. In fact, darkness often brings great gifts. In our own lives, darkness brings needed rest and relaxation. Intervals of light and darkness are necessary for plants to germinate. In hot, desert areas, darkness brings a welcome and needed break from the heat of the day.

Even if darkness is unfamiliar to us now, it was a common experience to our ancestors in the faith. Before the era of electric lights, they would have known the darkness that we almost never experience. They would have had an intimate knowledge of this strange and intimidating experience.

And that experience with darkness is reflected in the stories that are recorded in the Bible. Darkness is a common theme, and unlike stories now, in which darkness is almost always sinister or even evil, for our ancestors in the faith darkness was many-faceted. Yes, darkness could be associated with death and evil; but darkness was also the place of promise and enlightenment. Out of darkness came creation, and out of darkness we are reborn. Even more astonishing, darkness could be the place of our encounter with God.

But even when darkness does not always bring evil and suffering, it can be profoundly disturbing. In times past, eclipses were often thought to be signs of God's wrath or of the imminent end of the world. Even today, despite our understanding of the way in which an eclipse can occur, such a darkening of the sun can trigger a profound sense of disease. The closest that I have come to experiencing a total eclipse was in 1984 in Houston. It never got completely dark there, but even though I could still easily see, I became profoundly uneasy as the eclipse progressed. The bright blue sky got darker but still remained blue. The sun still shone in the cloudless sky but its intensity diminished. Everything looked odd, and the effect was unsettling. I could understand how ancient people who had no way of understanding what was happening might very well have thought that the world was ending or at least radically changing.

If the stories in the Bible that feature darkness have a common theme, it is that of change and transformation. Darkness is the time to confront those things that we may not wish to confront. The darkness is the time to see what we have been unable to see while blinded by the light. The darkness is the time of endings and beginnings.

So it has been for me. Some of the most important moments of my spiritual life have occurred in times of great darkness. In the darkness, I have been reborn. In darkness, I have struggled. In darkness, I have been enlightened. In darkness, I have encountered God.

Although there is much in me that still tries to avoid times of darkness, I cannot. For if I am journeying toward the One who made both light and darkness, I need to embrace both the light and the dark. As Psalm 139:712 affirms, darkness cannot hide me from the One who made it and who made me.

Perhaps the most common feeling in the various experiences that we collectively call "times of darkness" is a sense of the absence of God. In our times of darkness it can be hard to believe that God is really present. Sometimes it is the sense of God's absence that precipitates the darkness, and at other times we only notice God's absence once we are in the darkness.

In darkness, we cannot see. For those of us who have full use of our eyes, not seeing is hardly to be imagined. Even more than our ears, our eyes are the sense that we use most to explore and make sense of our world. It is difficult for most of us to describe things or people without saying what they look like.

In Madeleine L'Engle's novel A Wrinkle in Time, the main characters are transported to a planet where the inhabitants have no eyes. The concept of sight is beyond their imagining. Meg, Calvin, and Mr. Murray all do their best to describe sight but it is an impossible task. When they try to describe the three beings who had helped them, they find that they cannot really do so, except by using sight images that meant nothing to the inhabitants of Ixchel. What Meg recalls about Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. What sit is the clothing that they wore, the way that they appeared. She could not separate who...