A Fruitful Darkness

The season of Advent, at least in the northern hemisphere, comes at that time of year when darkness is much more prevalent.  These are the days when, for many of us, our morning and evening commutes both happen in the dark.  The closer we get to the Winter Solstice, the shorter the days get.  While it provides a good backdrop for the overzealous application of artificial Christmas lights, the growing darkness can still feel oppressive at times. With darkness can come disorientation, confusion, fear, and despair.  If you’ve ever experienced complete darkness, which is rare these days, you know just how disorienting and oppressive it can feel.  Understandably, Christians have often associated darkness with the absence of God.   

As much as we may want to keep it at bay, Advent invites a reorientation of our perspective on the darkness of the season.  As Derek Penwell writes in a recent blog post,

“…the scandal of this season is that the darkness we sit in is not the darkness of a cold, empty void. It’s the darkness of the womb.  This is the thick, hidden place where something new is being knit together and God quietly plots against despair (literally) from the inside out. We light candles, not to banish the dark, but to bear witness to the labor.  Each tiny, fragile flame is the trembling reminder that birth is on the way.”

I find this to be a profoundly helpful reframing of the darkness of this season. The darkness of the womb, for example, is fruitful and life-giving. It is a dark place where the ongoing process of creation continues to happen.  The womb is a place of sacred collaboration between God and us. We are co-creators, participants in the process of bringing new life out of the darkness. Even, and perhaps especially, in life’s moments of darkness, God is at work.

Poet John O'Donohue seems to agree:

Light cannot see inside things

That is what the dark is for:

Minding the interior,

Nurturing the draw of growth

Through the places where death

In its own way turns into life.

(from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings)

Mary, of course, is the pure embodiment of the sacred collaboration between us and God.  In her faithful receptivity, despite the incomprehensible circumstances, she allowed her womb to become that “thick, hidden place where something new (was) being knit together.”  She became a willing and active participant in God’s quiet “plot against despair”.  As the darkness of this season envelops us, and as we light candles, may we trust God’s ongoing work of loving liberation, even and especially in the darkness. 

Yours in Christ,

Kevin+