That Christmas Eve day as I sat in my study still struggling with my sermon, I got honest with myself and admitted that it had been a difficult year, and I was stuck in the infamous “dark night of the soul.”1 St. John of the Cross, a sixteenth-century mystic who coined this phrase, was plunged into darkness and despair when he was imprisoned for supporting a reform movement within his Carmelite Order. For nine months, he was beaten, starved, and confined to a monastery cell “with no other light than that which came in through the diminutive opening high up in the wall of the tiny cell.”2 During his imprisonment, John of the Cross encountered the complete and total absence of God to the point that he could no longer pray.
Though I was not imprisoned in a dungeon or being tortured for my religious convictions, I was wrestling with the question of passing or claiming my faith. In the midst of the Episcopal Church heresy trial over the issue of gay/lesbian ordination, I was struggling with the institutional church and its tendency toward exclusivity, tokenism, scapegoating, and conflict avoidance at the cost of justice. I was engaging the deeper and more systemic issues of urban poverty and violence and found myself rethinking the role of the church in the city and my own ministry as an urban priest. Ten years out of seminary, I was running on empty. I was so exhausted that I came down with pneumonia and was confined to bed for much of Advent.
Darkness had intruded upon my life as an uninvited and unwelcome guest. I had journeyed to that place of emptiness, loneliness, and gloom where “the night [had stripped] away the surface of my world.”3 It had been a long season of patiently waiting, watching, and hoping for God to light up my darkness. And when Christmas was upon me, with no end to the darkness in sight, I had to do something to overcome it. I had to confront the darkness head-on without divine intervention. I had to light up my own world.
Over the years, I’ve looked back on that crazy pre–Christmas Eve with a modicum of laughter and embarrassment. What a fool I made of myself running into the drugstore at closing, insisting like a mad woman that I had to exchange my defective Christmas lights when those tired employees were trying to lock up and go home for the night. You would have thought that I needed a prescription from the pharmacy to save my life. Maybe I did. Maybe those lights were antibiotics to ward off the evil spirits of darkness that had invaded my soul and interrupted my life.
Darkness is not an evil spirit. Rather, darkness is a primal element. It existed before light. Darkness is the background, the underpinning, and the fabric for the quilt of creation. The Book of Genesis tells us that in the beginning, “darkness covered the face of the deep” (Gen. 1:2). Creation began in the dark of night. It was out of darkness that God gave birth to the rest of the created order, including light. And it is in the darkness of the womb that life is conceived.
According to Edith Hamilton, the ancient Greeks believed that “Long before the gods appeared, in the dim past, uncounted ages ago, there was only the formless confusion of Chaos brooded over by unbroken darkness. Night was the child of Chaos and so was Erebus, which is the unfathomable depth where death dwells. In the whole universe there was nothing else: all was black, empty, silent, endless. . . . And then a marvel of marvels came to pass. In some mysterious way, from this horror of black boundless vacancy the best of all things came into being. . . . From darkness and from death, Love was born, and with its birth, order and beauty began to banish blind confusion.”4 Was love trying to be born anew in me that long, dark Advent?
In most cultures, primal darkness is considered chaotic. The North Australian aborigines say that “In the beginning, all was darkness forever. Night covered the earth in a great tangle.”5 The poet John Milton spoke of the primal Chaos as “the vast immeasurable abyss, outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild.”6 And yet, the Bible tells us that God created both light and darkness (Gen. 1:5, Isa. 45:7). Was God creating something new in the chaos of my darkness?
The Fourth Gospel tells us, “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . in [the Word] was life, and the life was the light of all people” (John 1:1, 4). The King James Version reads, “The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:5).7 How about that? Both darkness and light were there in the beginning of creation, and yet the darkness did not understand the light. Was God simply doing a new thing in my life that the dark shadows of my unconscious did not yet comprehend?
This light, that enlightens everyone who receives it, was said to be the Word of God. It was the Word that was with the Eternal One when the world was created. It was the Word spoken by the Creator to human beings since Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden. It was the very Word that called Abraham and Sarah to birth a chosen people. It was the Word that rescued their descendants from slavery and led them through the wilderness to a promised land. It was the Word that became Torah, a new way of life. It was the same Word that, through the prophets and priests of old, disciplined God’s people when they went astray and called them to renewal and right relationship over and over again. But for reasons as varied as our humanity, the Word was not always heard and followed. And when the Word fell on deaf ears, the Light that accompanied it became dim and the world grew dark. Was God renewing the Word in my life and my darkness could not understand it?
According to Christian tradition, in the fullness of time, God decided to do something radically new: to send the Word, the Light, into the world as a human being. So on a dark and cold winter night over 2,000 years ago, a baby was born, and the Divine Word, the Eternal Light, came among us and became one of us. Jesus shared the Light and spread the Word wherever he went. He shed the Light on the poor, the sick, the outcast, the oppressed, and the marginalized. He shared the Word with both the powerful and the powerless, those living in the center and on the edge. He showed the way to all who would follow.
The scriptures tell us that he was received by some and rejected by others, so that eventually the wood of the cradle became the wood of the cross. At his death, the Word was silenced and the world once again became dark. But the essence of the Divine Light remained. God’s Word among us could not and would not be entombed by death and evil forever. Christ rose from the grave, and with him the Light ascended in the morning sky and the Word was heard again. Was God resurrecting the Light of the Word in me, and I could not hear or see it yet?
Throughout human history, the Word of God has been with us, and the Light of Christ has never been extinguished. It has dimmed in places of war and times of terror, but whenever we act in faith against oppression, hatred, and poverty, we echo the Word and rekindle the Light. Whenever we lead another to God’s love, we become a beacon in the night and a flashlight illuminating the way. Whenever we gather together to proclaim the love of God for the world, we become a bonfire of joy and a chorus of angels. Was God helping me to understand the contemplative, creative energy of the dark so that I could appreciate more deeply the Light of the Word?
That Christmas Eve I went to church for our traditional midnight mass. At the end of the service, the lights were turned off, and by the flicker of a single candle I read aloud from the prologue of John’s Gospel. As I said the phrase, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it,” I thought to myself, maybe the light did not comprehend the darkness either. Maybe it was a mutual misunderstanding between God’s two original beloved creatures. Maybe that’s where the original power struggle began. And then I settled into the darkness. When we sang “Silent Night” by candlelight in a darkened church that year, for one brief moment time stopped and the world felt safe. The darkness felt safe.
In the prayer book of the Anglican Church in the Province of New Zealand,