And Now…Darkness
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
August 20, 2023
Good morning, Friends, and welcome to Light Reflections. For several weeks we talked about shining, sharing, and living in the Light, and now…let’s talk about darkness. The scripture I chose is part of one of my favorite Psalms.
Psalm 139: 7-12 from the New International Version.
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
I was thinking this week while sitting in the dark one evening in our front room about when I first really engaged the darkness. I am sure it was when I was young and afraid of the dark and asked my mom for a nightlight – as several of our children shared a few weeks ago in the Children’s Message.
But then I remembered when I was in junior high. My youth leaders at the time had encouraged us to read a book that was being considered Christian Horror or as one person said the “Stephen King of Christian Books.” The book they were encouraging us to read was “This Present Darkness” by Frank Peretti. (I know for some of you, I just entered your darkness by reminding you of this book.)
“This Present Darkness” went viral in the pre-internet era, selling millions of copies and spreading through word of mouth across churches all over our country. It was sold at almost every youth event and Christian concert I attended in those days. Everyone was talking about it. This was the precursor to the Left Behind series that would have a similar effect a few years later. And it’s easy to see why it was so popular. This was the peak of what we now label the “Satanic Panic” and in many ways gave the reader a glimpse at what was happening in this so-called dark satanic world around us. I think at each of my youth events we had a breakout session about satanic worship and the cigarettes, drugs, movies, and rock n’roll that supported it.
Many seemingly religious folks used “This Present Darkness” to place fear in the hearts of young Christians by opening them up to this wild battle taking place between demons and angels for their soul. It drew me in and at my age had me reading a satanic plot into every moment of my life for several years.
Forget about monsters under your bed or in your closet at night. Now, in junior high I was learning about angels and demons literally fighting over and around me all day just out of my sight. No nightlight could shed enough light to bring this scary scenario into sight.
Today, many have written that this book was the primer for helping create in the minds of young people exactly what we see being played out in our country, today. Just listen to this one description of “This Present Darkness” – I think you will see what I am talking about:
A sinister schoolteacher steadily grooms kids in their care to accept liberal indoctrination, ultimately leading to the takeover of young minds by shadowy forces. All the while, the teachers are backed by a larger, high-powered conspiracy to control the government, the educational system, and the national media.
That could be taken right out of our headlines, today. And I believe it is deeply connected to our headlines, today. I could go on, but this is not what I want to focus on this morning. If you want to read more about this type of influence, go read “Jesus and John Wayne” by Kristin Kobes Du Mez to have your eyes fully opened to how we arrived at where we are, today.
For me, “This Present Darkness,” unfairly distorted and categorized darkness. It taught me to fear and avoid those things that others categorized as darkness or could lead to darkness rather than learning from them.
Soon I was being told I could be sent into eternal darkness – which they called hell. And my heart could become hardened and filled with this darkness and ultimately removed from God. Really scary thoughts for a junior higher. The fear this produced, soon had me labeling neighbors, teachers, groups, even other denominations, and religious faiths as bearers of this darkness.
My world and my faith soon became bifurcated into things that were good (Light) and those that were bad (Darkness), something the church has embraced for many years and for a variety of reasons – but especially to control outcomes.
It wouldn’t be until much later, when I would be introduced to a completely different take on darkness. It was Quakers, “experts in the Light” that had a slightly different view of darkness, that wasn’t quite so bifurcated and so connected to being evil or satanic.
I read what Quaker Mark Russ had penned,
“There is darkness as a natural part of being alive, or a natural process we need to work through at different times in our lives.”
I realized quickly that darkness was not always evil…nor was it always bad or something to fear, but rather something to utilize as part of our natural life system.
Instead of ridding oneself of darkness, I was realizing it is part of each one of us.
That changed things a great deal for me.
One of the most positive descriptions of darkness in Quakerism, again as a natural process, is Jocelyn Burnell’s description. She says,
“Although we tend to equate evil with darkness, we should remember that in the plant world roots grow in the dark. Darkness (and shadows) are as much a part of the natural order as light.”
If you have ever taken a Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator Test, you may have found it helpful knowing your Personality Type, but a few years after it came out, a study showed that it was almost more important for people to spend time exploring their “shadow” sides because it will make them more well-rounded and understand where they struggle.
In her book, which I highly recommend, Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor, she explains the prevalence of both light and dark in our lives this way:
To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight. We need darkness; it is just as essential to our physical well-being as light. We not only need plenty of darkness to sleep well; we need it to be well.
She goes as far as explaining it as embracing a “Lunar Spirituality.” Taylor believes most churches today focus on Sunlight Spirituality and do not balance it out with a Lunar Spirituality as well. Thus, they are not prepared for all that the world throws at them. She goes on to say,
While we are drawn to the light, we would also be wise to understand the values of darkness, even when the darkness represents things that are uncomfortable, unfamiliar, scary, painful and even inconvenient.
Sometimes the way out of darkness begins with our willingness to enter the darkness.
Instead of avoiding the darkness, as we are often so prone to do, have we ever considered how it might prove more valuable to actually choose to enter into it?
To speak more candidly from a spiritual perspective, sometimes the way to God is choosing to go down instead of (instinctually) going up. In other words, when it comes to our desire to avoid, or even expedite the darkness, sometimes…
The way out is in.
The way up is down.
Such are the paradoxes of the manner in which God’s kingdom operates.
Barbara Brown Taylor points out that, if you look up “dark” and “darkness” in scripture, they are unanimous with being negative.
But if you look up the stories, it’s a whole different thing.
“In Genesis, darkness existed before God even got to work as a primal substance. Everything was made by God from dark. In Exodus, God promises to come to Moses on Mount Sinai in a dense or dark cloud. Here, darkness is divine and where God dwells. Abraham meets God in the darkness, Jacob wrestles an angel in the middle of the night, and angels announce Christ’s birth to the shepherds at night. There’s so much that happens in the dark that is essential to the Christian story.”
Folks, dark simply means “without illumination.”
Darkness is what remains in mystery.
It is what is yet unformed.
It is the womb.
It is the inside, the below, the deep, and the cave.
Darkness creates the space of not knowing that allows us each to become enlightened and illuminated with truth through a journey towards our own inner gnosis (wisdom) and light, rather than from an outside source.
This is illustrated so well in arguably the best of the original Star Wars Trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back when Luke Skywalker realizes there is something not right on Dagoba. He asks Yoda what it is, and Yoda tells Luke, he must go find out. Luke askes what is in the cave and Yoda responses, “Only what you take with you.” Luke then enters the cave and soon finds that he is facing his greatest fear, Darth Vader. Luke quickly pulls out his lightsaber and begins to fight him, ultimately cutting off Darth Vader’s head. But in a moment of enlightenment, Darth Vader’s mask bursts open to reveal Luke’s face below. Luke was on a journey toward his inner wisdom and light, and he comes face to face with his real fear. A darkness he doesn’t know the full extent of yet but has him searching for the light within himself and within his father.
In one of my favorite books, A Testament of Devotion, Quaker Thomas Kelly put words to this journey, when he wrote,
What is urged here are inward practices of the mind at deepest levels, letting it swing like the needle, to the polestar of the soul. And like the needle, the Inward Light becomes the truest guide of life, showing us new and unsuspected defects in ourselves and our fellows, showing us new and unsuspected possibilities in the power and life of good will among [humans].
I started this message by talking about a story that gave me a skewed view of darkness. But let me end with a story by Rev. Erica Baron that I think illustrates what I am getting at:
Once upon a time there lived people who loved the light.
As soon as the sun rose every morning, they were up to welcome it, singing songs of celebration for the light. And when the sun went down each evening they sang other songs, sad songs, songs of missing the light of the sun. They loved the light so very much.
They did not love the darkness. Once darkness fell every night, they would hurry to bed, since they could only bear the darkness when they were asleep. Even then, total darkness was frightening to them, and so they always kept a fire burning in every room.
The people’s dearest wish was that the sun would not set in the evening, that darkness would never fall. But every day the sunset and they sang their sad songs and they endured the fearful, sad, strange darkness until they could greet the sun again the next day.
Now in this land were born two remarkable children. They were twins. One was a girl, and she seemed to shine from within. Whenever she entered a room, everything seemed to get a little brighter. And the people loved her very much.
The other was a boy, and he seemed to bring darkness with him. Whenever he entered a room, everything seemed a little dimmer. And the people did not like him. They feared him because he reminded them of the great darkness of the night.
But although the people loved the girl and did not love the boy, the twins loved each other very much. And because the girl loved her brother so very much, the people mostly let him be, even though they were afraid of him.
Now, as they grew, it became clear that these children were, in fact, magical children. The girl had the power to bring life back when it was harmed or lost. When she was a very small child, she could heal small cuts and bruises. When she grew a little older, she could heal broken bones and other larger hurts. And by the time she was a teenager, she could make the crops grow faster and larger and fuller. She could bring plants and animals that had died back to life. The people suspected she could even bring people back to life, but they were a little afraid to ask, and she did not offer.
The boy, on the other hand, had the power to calm and quiet anything. When he was a very small child, he could help his family go to sleep more quickly, thus saving them from the fear of the darkness. When he was a little older, he could calm animals when they were frightened and make them still. Sometimes, he would go first to an animal or a person who was hurt and help them to be calm enough for his sister’s healing magic to work. And by the time he was a teenager, he could calm storms and winds and rains. He could bring anything to stillness.
The people’s love for the light and fear of the darkness only grew with time, perhaps more strongly with the twins always before them to remind them.
And so one day, they decided to ask the girl for a favor. They asked her to see if her magic could hold the sun in the sky and stop the night from coming. The girl was reluctant, but after many, many months of being asked, she finally decided to try, just to get the people to leave her alone. One day, just as the sun was at its highest point, she went out onto the top of the highest hill in the land, and she threw her arms up into the sky, and she asked the sun to stop, to stay right there at the top of the sky forever.
She wasn’t immediately sure that anything had happened. The sun usually moves so slowly. But before very long it became clear that something had happened. The sun had stopped in the sky.
The people were overjoyed. There was a big celebration. They sang all of their songs celebrating the sun. They loved the girl even more—at least at first. For the first week or so, everyone was happy and content.
But soon they began to get tired. Although they had always slept with a fire to ward off the darkness, sleeping in the full light of the sun was another thing altogether. They tossed and turned and woke up constantly. Some of them remembered that the boy could help with sleep, and asked for his aid, but his power of bringing sleep seemed to have disappeared along with the darkness.
After about a month, the exhausted, frustrated people began to see that this constant sunlight was a problem. Though they still loved the light, they began to wish that the sun would once again move in the sky. Each person at first thought that they were the only one who thought this. And given the people’s love of the light and fear of the darkness, everyone was afraid, at first, to say anything about this growing longing for nighttime. But slowly, softly, as they began to confide in each other, they discovered that everyone felt this way. And they finally decided that something must be done.
They went back to the girl and asked her to get the sun to move again. It was her magic that had stopped it, and they figured her magic could make it move again. So, she went back up onto the top of the highest hill, threw her arms up into the sky and asked the sun to move. Nothing happened. She tried again. And a third time, but the sun stayed still. Sadly, she turned to the people and told them there was nothing she could do. There was a long moment of growing panic before the boy stepped forward. “Let me try,” he said softly. Everyone thought about it for a moment and then decided this was a good idea.
So, he took his sister’s place on the top of the highest hill, threw his arms up to the sky, and asked the sun to move. The sun began moving at once, rushing toward the western horizon. Within ten minutes, it had set, and within fifteen, it was full, dark night.
The people were caught off guard. They had all come out to the hill to see if the girl’s magic would work. They had no fires lit—they hadn’t needed them in weeks. They had nothing with them to light their way. They had never been outside at night before, and they were terrified.
At first, they tried rushing home to get away from the darkness, but they soon discovered that rushing when you can’t see where you are going is a bad idea. They slowed down, but still peered at the ground, trying to get home as soon as they could. But then, one of them looked up. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Look!” Everyone looked up, and then they all saw the stars for the first time. They had never been outside at night before, and had no idea of the incredible beauty of a sky full of stars. They all stopped hurrying toward their homes and stood and stared in wonder. And then they realized how very tired they were, and so slowly now, and with more reverence, they started home again. They all slept for a very long time.
The people rested and were glad, and appreciated the darkness for the first time in their lives. Eventually, the sun rose again. As it did, the people got out of their beds and sang their songs to celebrate the coming of the light. But at the end of the day, as the sun began to sink toward the horizon, they did not feel like singing their sad songs. Instead, one of the musicians began singing a new song, a slow, quiet song of thanksgiving for the night. And soon the others joined in. It became their new sunset song.
And the boy and the girl grew up to be a man and a woman, and both of them were now much beloved by the people. Looking at them, still the best of friends as well as siblings, the people remembered that light and darkness are best in balance.
Now, as we enter a time of waiting worship, consider the following queries.
1. What has distorted my view of darkness? Do I believe it to be a natural part of my life?
2. Instead of avoiding the darkness have I ever considered how it might prove more valuable to choose to enter it?
3. What will bring more of a balance to the light and darkness of my world?