Songs for the Darkness

Going to work one recent morning along my tree-lined avenue I was abuzz with a bright, calm sense of happiness. The world was ablaze with autumnal colour, the river and sky a dazzling blue. Most of all that morning I was grateful that poetry existed. I often am but that more it was specifically Biblical poetry -- the reading of the day had been arrestingly beautiful, beginning 'Wisdom, the Fashioner of All Things, taught me' and ending with 'And she orders all things well.' How could one fail to have faith in a cosmos where this kind of praise exists? The passage was packed (and I mean packed!) with adjectives and was written with soul-stirring feminine pronouns. How marvelous it is to have words that lift us onto the very lap of Wisdom. Oh, that piece really got me and made me glad, glad, glad!

The text had been paired, as is the format on the wonderful Pray As You Go podcasts, with a song, a chant from the always beautiful Taize community. I love Taize chants and find them on my tongue in all sorts of unexpected times and places bubbling up from my heart. There was a phrase in this chant, however, that struck a perplexing note and I've been trying to figure out why. The phrase was: "Do not let my darkness speak to me."

(To be fair you should know that I am taking the lines out of the context. The thrust of the chant begins and ends with welcoming Christ, the 'inner light' -- but still, I can't help thinking . . . and maybe such a purposively light-saturated blog such as is and will be contained in this Ten Thousand Halos blog, is not the place to reflect on darkness? Or, perhaps it is.)

What it was, I think, that had the impact was the word 'my' in front of darkness. I believe that my darkness is no less precious than my light; neither of which I know, or can know, ultimately. I cannot really imagine one without the other. This may simply be a limitation of language. It may as well be a limitation of my imagination.

Now, I'm not really of the generation that would have the words "Hello, Darkness, my old friend" springing up as an association (though New Scientist's December edition on The Night jogged the memory.) At this time of the year in the northern hemisphere we do well to cultivate friendship with the dark. Instead of Simon & Garfunkel, I found myself remembering Prospero's words from The Tempest,

"This thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine." 

The season of Advent marks the deepest darkness settling on the northern hemisphere of our planet . . . I like it, this beginning in darkness, small soul seeds beginning to buzz. But no, it was not this aspect that had me in its grip. It was, instead, MY darkness. So I listened some more on a long afternoon walk one day. And there is a voice there, sounding pain, fears, fragilities. It washes through me, a moving stream. 

I decided then to enter another kind of moving stream, the internet, and I offered up the chain of words that had been bothering me. And up from the shallows a glimmer of understanding arose from an article about [Taizé founder] Brother Roger, a luminous and extraordinary man. For him, I read, the chant was a favourite. As I understand it, this was because of the risks entailed in the radical obedience to Christ he lived. When one draws near Truth, darkness becomes, well, more chatty, to put it lightly. 'It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God' (Hebrews 10:31, NRSV) we are told, and in a truly illuminating interview with Sarah Coakley on prayer she notes that

"one of the most important things to happen in [learning how to pray] is a barely perceptible sharpening or transformation of the senses and the mind, partly because what we now call the unconscious is welling up and forcing itself to be integrated. . . "

For Br. Roger, the darkness took the form of 'insinuations of doubt.' We are each woven of strands of light & darkness, a reality Br. Roger was very much in touch with. He knew that no unity is possible without reconciliation on interpersonal and intrapersonal levels. We are called upon as people of faith to examine our assumptions and the illusions that keep us from the experience of growing together, of unity. And though we can never say we have reached the end of this process of reconciliation, forgiveness liberates 'the depths of the human heart that are made for goodness.' 

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I entitled this post 'Songs for the Darkness' because one night between then and now a couple of angels appeared to me in the dark one night. A late afternoon walk had gone on longer than I had anticipated and I found myself on the home straits walking in the dark. I heard them before I saw them, singing softly, sweetly and in harmony. I felt warmly accompanied, for this was an evening I had opened myself up to some deeper currents . . . and as I saw them I realised beside me were two adolescent boys, uniformed and humpbacked with their athletic gear in large bags behind them, peddling slowly home along the river. They passed in moments but their unexpected presence and the sweetness of the encounter, I still taste. 

Have I veered away from the snag of the phrase? What I wanted to say was: in and out of darkness songs escape us, and this is a good thing. A very good thing! Songs like the Taize chants remind us that we float on the breath, and so, 'do not let my darkness speak to me' at the close of this reflection has come to mean, not a kind of 'denial' as I had initially taken it, but rather, do not allow my darkness either to overwhelm or undermine the divine goodness I carry.

With gratitude then, I dare say: Wisdom has thus taught me.