COLUMN: Grey Matters – Dark in the dark

“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people.” -Carl Jung

Long before clocks dictated our days and electric light chased the night away, human life moved in quiet partnership with the sky. Dawn called us gently into one another’s presence, while dusk invited us home again – to fires, stories, prayers, and rest. Darkness was not an enemy then. It was a dwelling place. We are now realizing that wellbeing does not come from constant brightness and striving, but from moving wisely and faithfully between light and dark.

We have become too binary in our thinking. Yes, there is a dark that is bad, that darkness makes a good metaphor for things like evil, sin and death. But we are not talking about that kind of dark. There is another dark: one that shelters, heals and is good. As Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “I wish I could turn to the church for help, but so many congregations are preoccupied with keeping the lights on right now that the last thing they want to talk about is how to befriend the dark… meanwhile, here is some good news you can use: even light fades and darkness falls – as it does every single day, in every single life – God does not turn the world over to some other deity.”

Our mistakes, our regrets, our willingness to feel the ache of this world – these, too, shape us into better loves of life and one another. After making friends with the dark, we can be moved to tender kindness for our friends when they have their dark times. Naomi Shihab Nye captures this truth in her poem Kindness:

Before you know what kindness really is, you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

Darkness is good for our health. If we lived in light 24/7, we would soon be tired, sick and frail. We had enlightenment but now could use some endarkenment. Our constant bright lights are harming the natural rhythms of creation and our lives. We should not be so strict with the timeline of our grief. It does not obey any tidy schedule. Instead of trying to climb up the slide of life, we should welcome the flow of our ‘dark’ emotions and slide down – only then can we get to the bottom safely and find our way back to the ladder. Our emotions are not to be feared. In striving to avoid emotions like sadness we can get stuck.

Befriend the dark, and you may find yourself become a gentler companion to your own soul, to God and to others. Dark in dark. We have heard the verses on light, but what about the beautiful dark? “I will give you the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that you may know that I, the LORD, who call you by your name, Am the God of Israel” (Isaiah 45:3).

Gary Dyck is a chaplain and spiritual care provider at a hospital and personal care home in the Southeast.