There’s an old Scottish blessing I learned as a child, it goes: “From ghoulies and ghosties, and long leggity beasties, and things that go bump in the night; good Lord deliver us.”
We’ve got an illuminated copy of it hanging on the wall of our bedroom. Mostly tongue in cheek, but a little not. After all, fear of the dark is a very real thing. Anyone who has laid awake listening to the noises a strange house makes knows what I’m talking about. The darkness is what hides the cat that ambushes, the prowling wolf pack, or the things we cannot name that stalk us in the darkness of our hearts.
But somewhere along the way we drew a dualistic pair. Light became good, and dark became evil. The dualism is baked into our language. Sacred scriptures the world round include those primal human fears of dangerous darkness. And over the years our culture has cemented the idea of darkness and dangerous and bad even into the way we view people. The darker the skin the less human that person becomes. Until wild myths have been ground into our cultural fabric, that black men have super human strength, that dark skinned people don’t feel pain, that those with darker skin are somehow “predisposed” for violence.
It is of course, not true. Darkness isn’t evil. But try going a full year through all the seasons, through the waxing and waning of the moon and the changing daylight without ever once using language that implies that darkness is negative and light must overcome it. As a preacher let me tell you, it’s hard.
Skin color has absolutely no baring on pain tolerance, or proclivity toward violence. The most dangerous creature on planet Earth is human, and operates primarily during the day. Our creaturely neighbors must heave a sigh of relief as the lights go off in our houses and we settle into our rest. Yet the myths remain, reinforced by language, story and symbolism that reaches beyond religious traditions or culture.
But it goes beyond old reasonable fears. In many cultures and mythologies the sun and day is given masculine attributes, while the moon and night have feminine. And I’ve run into enough folks who think that these distinctions imply the feminine is weaker, or sinister, to realize the prejudice against darkness goes deep.
Setting aside our ancient ancestors huddled around campfires; darkness is a great gift. We’ve talked in the past about how darkness is literally necessary for life (plants that photosynthesize require regular periods of darkness for the process to continue to function properly).
Lately I’ve been thinking about the feminine, the masculine, and our assumptions about power and strength. I knew someone who was going through Air Force officer training and was trying to qualify as a pilot. She related a story that the grizzled old flight instructor shared. He’d been training pilots for years, from before women were allowed to train for combat missions and after. And he told her that hands down women were the more effective and dangerous fighting pilots. When she asked why that was he gave her statistics about hand eye coordination, height and what makes people able to withstand higher g-forces.
But finally he sat back and said: it really comes down to this. If you shoot one of my guy’s buddies out the sky he is going to go berserk and try to kill you, and probably get killed himself. If you shoot one of the women’s buddies down she doesn’t lose her head, she bides her time, she might even retreat; but she’ll get you.
The story is of course full of cultural assumptions and generalizations that don’t hold true across all individuals but it does reveal something about what we think of as strength and weakness. For generations (thousands upon thousands) Western civilization has considered the direct confrontational approach to be what strength is. It is the brave thing, the manly thing. It is men charging over the hill with swords, or going into a berserker rage.
Subtler approaches to the same problem are viewed as weaker. Ironically, women are generally considered more emotional, but the antagonistic aggressive approach (which is fueled by emotion) is connected to the masculine and strength. From racism to misogyny we’re proof that sense doesn’t often enter into it with humans.
The whole lot are tied up together: our disordered relation to our emotions, those that are valued and in whom; and our denigration of those things which have been coded as feminine, like darkness.
Returning to wholeness requires us to reclaim the gift of darkness. The long cool evenings after the oppressive heat of a summer day, the vulnerable moments in bed with our lover sharing our hopes and fears in the safely enfolding darkness, the invitation to rest that darkness provides.
In my 40s I have developed insomnia, not a fate I would wish on anyone, but it has brought me more than ever into darkness in a way that cannot be avoided. The neighborhood outside our front windows is a different place limned with moonlight, still and hushed. The wind settles, the trees grow still. Wait deep enough into the darkness and even the frogs and the crickets grow quiet until only the breeze humms a low tune to herself. I sat in the darkness of our living room one night just watching the still neighborhood. No busyness, no rushing, there was no work being done, no productivity being measured. At one point an enormous raccoon wandered out of the shadows into the moonlit drive. It stopped there, scratched itself and sat for a while, maybe thinking.
There were no barking dogs to hurry it on, no exterminators to pester it. Eventually it sauntered off on some business of its own leaving the moon bathed landscape once again at rest.
I have come to appreciate the quiet stillness that darkness offers, the invitation to rest or to at least cease in our unceasing rushing. To be less distracted by color and spectacle and learn to see shape and movement. We too get to cease our worry about how we look, how we’re dressed, and blend into the background, dark shapes against moonlight, silhouette.
But beyond rest and the coolness of evening darkness offers a gift that is probably the most radical for our current world: mystery. Darkness cloaks, it leaves space for things we cannot see, it is peopled by our imagination.
When I was a child I lived in rural Michigan. Then the nights were dark, the sky a canvas of inky blackness and across it unrolled the Milky Way in all its soft and overwhelming glory. I spent many nights on my back on the grass gazing up into a spill of stars that made me feel as if I were about to tilt off the world and fall into it. And those moments taught me about mystery, and how darkness invites us to admit what we do not know, to revel in our own smallness.
This, more than anything, is antithetical to a culture that demands rightness and certainty. If you have ever gone down deep, deep into a cave until all natural light is lost and turned off your flashlights you’ve felt perhaps a bit of this gift. You’ve sat there on what you know is a solid rock, in a room you know the size and shape of and felt the vast impossibility of an infinite universe unroll around you, and shrink to just beyond your skin. It is an eerie and unsettling feeling, and one we need more of perhaps.
Reclaiming darkness is more than just modifying our automatic speech patterns, it is about altering our thinking. Reclaiming darkness requires us to reclaim the edges of the known, to be willing to live with the liminal and the seemingly incongruent. To stand in the tension of the both/and, the already/not yet. This doesn’t require us to subscribe to a set of religious principles, believe in God (or not) but to be open to the idea that there may be more to this wild existence in which we find ourselves than we can conceive, and that is a good thing.
