Dear Church Family,
As we approach the longest night of the year, in what feels like a very long year, I would like to invite you to examine your relationship with darkness. It is a complex subject, of course; some of us may be chemically affected by the seasonal change and require artificial sunlight to make it through the year without major difficulties. (Perhaps we were never meant to live so far from the equator!) Others experience these long nights as cozy times to curl up with a good book by the fire, and have built up good memories of such times to get us through. This year is going to be different, and will be hard for most people in one way another; whether or not you are grieving one of the three hundred thousand lost to covid this year, we all will have a different holiday season, and if you are alone or missing family, these long dark nights may seem even longer… interminable, even. It may be tempting to curse the dark this year. But I’d ask you to stop and question whether darkness is the culprit.
The anti-racist work and reading I have done this year has cautioned me in many ways about problematic interpretations of darkness. The same Christian, European prayer books that instructed people to pray “Lighten my darkness, O Lord,” were also accompanied by religious instruction telling black and indigenous people of color to leave behind their dirty and dark cultural ways and become more white, clean, pure, and righteous — words that were used interchangeably and uncritically. Lightness and particularly whiteness have been unnaturally blessed with innocence in this cultural context, while darkness has been burdened with guilt. While we might all be wise enough to reject any overt forms of this metaphor, its legacy has been carried on culturally in ever-subtler ways, so that one might not stop and question whether the dark-skinned stranger who enters a movie scene through the shadows should really be burdened with the assumption that he’s up to no good.
We have work to do, religiously, in untangling ourselves from the connotation of dark with bad. Luckily we have some resources in our own faith tradition and do not have to research far afield to find good, strong counter-narratives to the pitfalls of the racist legacy we seek to leave behind. In the Bible, God’s glory is described in terms of the majesty of darkness: “clouds and thick darkness surround him; righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne” (Psalm 97:2). In the Song of Songs, it is made clear from the first that the king’s beloved is proud of her dark body: “I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem.” And in a commonly misinterpreted Christmas passage, John 1:1-5, the light “shines in the darkness” not as a battle between good and bad, but as necessary companions that have been there since the beginning of creation. Yes, God specifically called out “light” as being “good” in the first passage of the Bible (Genesis 1:4), but the darkness was created first, and the light could not be seen without the darkness.
So this Christmas, seek the beauty of darkness. Seek the embracing comfort of its shadows where one can grieve naturally, unbothered by the glaring scrutiny of light. Remember this year the glory of the God who is surrounded by clouds and thick darkness, and rejoice that it is in the beauty of such a star-filled night that Emmanuel is born: God with us.
Every Blessing,
Talitha