After what has felt like an endless winter in upstate new York, the days are getting warmer. A few days we have seen bright sunshine. Yesterday started off dull and overcast. By mid afternoon the sun was a brilliant white that bathed the earth in spring glory. How nice to feel the sun on your face!Many of us have an endless fascination with sunrise and sunset—the beginning of the light, the turning of the dark. The sun is rising ... take a photo. the sun is setting ... take another.
The world's myths are often stories of light and darkness. The light is good, the darkness bad. An early Christian writer said, "God is light, in whom there is no darkness at all ..."
In the world's religions, the blessed state is one of "enlightenment," the unenlightened remains in darkness. In Star Wars, Anakin Skywalker is seduced to the "dark side" and becomes Darth Vader. Civilized Europeans began to explore Africa and termed it "the dark continent," an unknown, mysterious Other (beset with racist undertones). The myths, metaphors and allusions to darkness as bad and light as good are too many to name.
Yet, I wonder.
In one of our recent bright days, as we walked the pugs through the neighborhood, the early evening sunshine was so bright I had to screw up my watering eyes against the pain. When factory farmers want their hens to produce more eggs they shock them by keeping bright lights on for forty-eight hours straight. When prisoners are tortured, the lights are kept brighter than day for days on end. Light can be very painful. A dear friend who suffers from migraine wears dark glasses when afflicted, for the light of day is too much to bear.
Perhaps light is not always good, and darkness not always bad.
The natural way is a rhythm of light and darkness—daily and seasonally. All light would be unbearable. All darkness would be crushing. To the ancient Chinese sages light is yang and darkness yin—neither more important than the other, or one good and one bad. Nature has balance, complementarity. There are times when light is needed—for growth, activity, and movement. There are times when darkness is required—for rest, stillness, and recuperation. Such is nature's way. And surely too such is the way of Nature's God.
Here's a conundrum: Traditionally, religion thinks of God as omnipresent—present in all that is all the time. If God is omnipresent, then there is nowhere that God is not. If God is not in darkness, then that is somewhere God is not, and that cannot be. If darkness is the absence of light, and God is only light, then God cannot be in darkness. If God is in all that is, and there is darkness, then God is in the darkness and cannot only be light.
As in nature, so in "super-nature"—on earth as in heaven.
A secret of life is to know how to live well in the light and how to live well in the darkness—to enjoy the constant dance of yin and yang, dark and light, silence and speech, female and male, soft and hard, insubstantial and substantial, spirit and matter, wave and particle.
Perhaps then we can sing softly the words of Paul Simon, "Hello darkness my old friend ..."
+Ab. Andy