Darkness to Light
BAdvent1 – 2017
Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37
December 3, 2017
Here we are back at the beginning of the church year:
the dark Advent blue of waiting and watching;
our church and our hearts pregnant as we wait with Mary for her child to be born.
As our children place the figure in the crèche each week,
we will anticipate the placing of the Christ child there on Christmas Eve.
As the light of the Advent wreath increases each week,
it will signal that the Light of Christ is coming into the world to overcome the darkness.
We ponder with Mary what all this means.
Before we move further into the season of waiting for the advent of Christ,
I want to take a moment to acknowledge the Coastal Carolina Christmas team,
co-chaired by Anne Frauens and David Tousignant,
that planned and produced the magical event here on Friday evening.
And, Ronnie, Richard, the Choir of St. Paul’s, the Wilmington Boys Choir,
and harpist Christina Brier performed a stellar concert of music
featuring John Rutter and Benjamin Britten.
The parish hall was transformed into a holiday theme
and the variety of chocolate delicacies was endless!
I think we can happily expect to see some of those chocolates at our hospitality reception today!
On top of all this, a Chinese auction was enjoyed by all
as we put our raffle tickets toward the items we liked.
All this was to raise funds to support three community ministries that are dear to our hearts:
Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard, Family Promise (Interfaith Hospitality Network), and the WBC.
Thanks to everyone! - those who worked hard behind the scenes to make the entire effort a great success and those who purchased tickets and sponsorships.
Now, on into Advent! From darkness to light.
Today I’m going to focus on the darkness and its place in our lives.
A phrase originated with St. John of the Cross back in the mid 1500’s -
-the dark night of the soul.
It was how he talked about that deep feeling of angst or dread;
a deep emptiness in which there seems to be no presence of God.
Some liken it to a homesickness for a place you can’t seem to get to;
a yearning for God to show up with meaning, yet everything remains meaningless.
For those who have experienced it, these descriptions are familiar.
For those who have not, the whole concept might seem a mystery, hard to grasp.
People of great faith and heroic deeds have been there.
This darkness in a person’s life is not from a weakness of character or from a lack of faith.
Dorothy Day was a journalist and social activist and quite the hedonist in the mid-20th century.
After a conversion in her life, shecame a tireless advocate of the poor
andco-founded the Catholic Worker newspaper.
She writes of her own dark night of the soul in her autobiographical book, “The Long Loneliness”.
When Mother Teresa’s letters to her spiritual director were made public,
The world found out that the smiling saint that served the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, India, had her own extended dark night of the soul.
From one of her letters in 1957
In the darkness . . . Lord, my God, who am I that you should forsake me? The child of your love — and now become as the most hated one. The one — you have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want, and there is no one to answer . . . Where I try to raise my thoughts to heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. Love — the word — it brings nothing. I am told God lives in me — and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.
We hear the same themes throughout the bible when God seems distant.
We hear it in Isaiah.
The people would rather experience the heavens tearing open and the mountains quaking at God’s presence rather than the silence and absence of God:
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down
and the mountains would quake at your presence!
God is blamed for his distance, his hiddenness.
If God were more involved, they reason, they would not have sinned.
But, instead:
We have all become like one who is unclean.
All our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.
We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you
for you have hidden your face from us…
YET, says the prophet, there is yearning and there is hope.
O Lord, you are our father.
We are the clay, and you are our potter.
We are all the work of your hand.
Even though everything seems lost and fallen apart,
Will you restrain yourself, O Lord?
Will you keep silent and punish us so severely?
A dark night in the soul of an entire people.
Richard Rohr, a contemporary Franciscan monk and theologian,
writes about the dark night of the soul.
He describes three kinds of darknesses:
By the time most people reach middle age, they’ve had days where life has lost its meaning,
they no longer connect with an inner sense of motivation or joy.
Sometimes this manifests as clinical depression and requires a therapist’s skilled care and medication.
But even if we don’t experience depression, most of us go through
a period of darkness, doubt, and malaise at some point in our lives.
There is also a kind of darkness that we get into of our own accord:
When we sin
-which Rohr describes as the illusion of being separate from God and neighbor,
even though we never, in reality, are truly separate;
and when we are selfish
-when we put our needs and well-being above others’.
Rohr says we have to work our way out of this kind of darkness
by brutal honesty, confession, surrender, forgiveness, apology, and restitution.
It may feel simultaneously like dying and being liberated.
We hear people way they had to get all the way to the bottom
before they could make their way back up.
We resist going through the darkness and facing our shadow,
so we usually need help, as the Twelve Steps wisely identify.
An accountability partner, spiritual director, or counselor
can help us navigate this difficult, ego-humiliating process.
And then, Rohr names the third darkness:
A darkness that we are led into by God, grace, and the nature of life itself.
In many ways, the loss of meaning, motivation, purpose, and direction might feel even greater here.
This is the darkness that the saints and mystics call “the dark night of the soul.”
But even while we feel alone and that God has abandoned us,
we sense that we have been led here intentionally.
We know we are in “liminal space,” living and yet in limbo, on the threshold of something
—and we have to stay here until we have learned something essential.
It is still no fun and filled with doubt and “demons” of every sort.
But it is the darkness of being held closely by God without being able to be aware of or take enjoyment in God’s presence.
This, says Rohr and many of the wise ones who have gone before us,
is where transformation happens.
John of the Cross writes about this darkness:
The endurance of darkness is the preparation for great light.
In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God.
Rohr reminds us that we can know that the unforeseeable is trustworthy.
Even though we cannot see how or when this darkness will lift,
we can trust that in everything, God is surely moving us into a life of grace and peace in Christ.
Even in the midst of dark times, we can be grounded in the absolute love of God,
that, while it doesn’t protect us from all things,it sustains us in all things.
This brings us to something that might seem odd,
but I’ve found it to be true in my life.
There is a difference between God being personally involved in our lives
and God being intimately involved in our lives.
To take God personally means that we perceive God to be out there directing traffic
and preferring that one person be in an accident while making sure another is not.
This personalized view of God is not helpful.
In fact it is dangerous, because it begins with our judgment of God and of other people.
To understand and experience that God is intimately involved in our lives is a different take.
God is always deeply involved in our lives – and indeed every life,
intimately close to us,in the midst of whatever may befall us, and promising never to leave us.
Isn’t that what we want with the persons closest to us;
Someone that will be there beside us through sickness and failures and through the dark times?
Richard Rohr has some helpful suggestions for us to keep in mind during the dark times:
Thinking and analyzing don’t make the light appear sooner. It isn’t a matter of will.
But we are encouraged to be still and quiet and to be mindfully aware of our feelings.
To accept and befriend the darkness rather than fight it.
We shouldn’t try to judge what we experience,
but, rather, ask God to hold it in truth for us.
We should take time to unplug -
to disconnect to stimuli that are virtual, that come at us from a distance,
that agitate us or confirm our worst fears.
Instead, spend time with things that are immediate and real in our lives;
Things that will ground us in the present:
Spend time with nature,
Engage in real matter like getting our hands in the dirt or in bread dough
or cutting real vegetables rather than nuking frozen ones;
Make real music no matter how it sounds rather than streaming in recorded music.
Bring on real sweat, getting tired from real exertion.
We should practice giving.
The more we give to others, the more we get outside ourselves
and what separates us from God and neighbor.
Focus on our deepest longings and intuitions, and our highest hopes –
not clinging to them but giving them to God and joining them to God’s higher purpose.
Advent can be a gift to us in this bright and busy world.
It reminds us that darkness is part of life.
It’s not easy, but it can be holy.
And, as we keep alert, as we watch and wait,
We can be assured from with words of scripture
And those faithful who have gone before us
That Christ is coming. New life and light are on the way.
Other quotes from St. John of the Cross:
What we need most in order to make progress is to be silent before this great God with our appetite and with our tongue, for the language he best hears is silent love.
It is great wisdom to know how to be silent and to look at neither the remarks, nor the deeds, nor the lives of others.
The soul that is attached to anything however much good there may be in it, will not arrive at the liberty of divine union. For whether it be a strong wire rope or a slender and delicate thread that holds the bird, it matters not, if it really holds it fast; for, until the cord be broken the bird cannot fly.
Never give up prayer, and should you find dryness and difficulty, persevere in it for this very reason. God often desires to see what love your soul has, and love is not tried by ease and satisfaction.
However softly we speak, God is so close to us that he can hear us; nor do we need wings to go in search of him, but merely to seek solitude and contemplate him within ourselves, without being surprised to find such a good Guest there.
Live in faith and hope, though it be in darkness, for in this darkness God protects the soul. Cast your care upon God for you are His and He will not forget you. Do not think that He is leaving you alone, for that would be to wrong Him.