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I attended a Billy Strings concert with my grandmother this past week. Billy Strings is a wildly popular instrumentalist who writes and plays some combination of bluegrass/folk/rock/punk and has an incredibly diverse following. Just before he and his band took the stage, the lights went down, and everybody cheered.
This got me thinking – when else do we cheer the arrival of darkness? You have to think of hard about that, because the most primal human instinct is to react to the dark with trepidation and some level of anxiety. This primal instinct is likely rooted in the ancient experience of being prey in a world before walls, lights and climate control. Fear of the dark was a useful survival instinct.
And this impulse has carried over into our cultural and religious expressions. Our stories and sacred texts are filled with images of light and darkness – where the dark is portrayed as the place we do not want to be. Darkness is the realm of monsters and evil and malevolent influences and suffering in these stories, and these stories construct our imaginations and play at our emotions. They sort of train us to feel uncomfortable in the dark.
But, a bigger question might be helpful to consider: Is there value in the darkness? What good comes from the dark? What experiences must we have in the darkness, because we can have them in no other way?
When you start to think a bit more deeply and intentionally, we come to find that the darkness is actually a space where the most transformative and defining experiences of our lives often take place.
Walking through a period of metaphorical 'darkness' means that we have come through a period of difficulty, which often give our lives more meaning and help to refine our values and purpose. In the time before electric lighting, the darkness actually brought people together – they needed to huddle around the limited candle or firelight that was available, and that closeness sparked conversation and shared reflection that helped forge relationships in much more intentional ways.
The stories of dark in scriptures often bring about a transformative experience for those who experience it. Even the journey of Jesus, in the Christian story of Easter resurrection, is necessitated by a journey through a period of darkness and shadow.
Just like our bodies need dark and sleep to repair and recuperate, maybe the emotional and spiritual aspects of ourselves also need rhythms of darkness to revitalize ourselves.
There is a wonderful book by Barbara Brown Taylor that explores this theme in great detail – and I stole the name of this column from the title of the book: “Learning to Walk in the Dark.” If you fancy going down this rabbit hole (in the dark), then I highly recommend it to you.
Instead of approaching periods and experiences of darkness as inherently negative, or experiences to be avoided, we might do well to consider the gifts that can only be given to us when we embrace the dark spaces of our lives and world. Instead of a tense and anxious duality between light and darkness, embracing the dark and light as opposite sides of the spiritual coin – each necessary for a healthy and full sense of self – can help us walk with a little less anxiety and a little more openness to the full spectrum of the world we inhabit, and the worlds we create.
Rev. Zac Morton is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) serving First Presbyterian Church of Morgantown. Zac is a native of Pittsburgh, PA and a graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.