A few years ago, our family snagged a local deal for a visit to a cavern attraction. Walking amongst the limestone formations is itself a memorable experience, but the one thing I’ll never forget is the darkness.
The tour is guided by lights, added obviously, for safety reasons and ease of navigation. But at one point in the tour, the person guiding the tour flips a switch and the cavern plunges into darkness.
Now I have camped in the woods and on the top of a mountain. I have lived in rural areas and experienced a fair share of power outages. But I can safely say that nothing prepared me for that kind of darkness.
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Rainer Taepper via Unsplash
Nor did my faith experience prepare me for the kind of darkness lingering in my own heart.
I can’t remember a time when darkness hasn’t lurked on the edges of my soul, always casting a shadow over even the best parts of my life. I have avoided darkness. Run past it. Held a flickering candle in shaking hands to keep it at bay. I have feared it. Denied it. Ignored it.
But it never went away completely.
So, I was surprised when God spoke a soul name over me that was quite the opposite of darkness. He lovingly whispered a name I couldn’t believe, and I know that sounds crazy, but if I could choose my own name, I wouldn’t have picked this.
The Bible is full of words about light overcoming darkness and people walking in darkness seeing light as if for the first time, of God providing leading at night, of promises that someday it will never be dark.
I don’t always know what to do with my darkness.
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Maybe that’s why the events of Holy Week frustrate me sometimes. At least in the traditions in which I’ve practiced, major emphasis is placed on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, and maybe Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday.
But lately I’ve been wondering about Saturday. We kind of skip over it, and even the sorrow of Good Friday is always framed in the light of Easter Sunday. The whole it’s-Friday-but-Sunday’s-coming thing.
That’s easier to see now, in retrospect, but what about that first Easter weekend? Between the cross and the celebration, there’s a whole day of darkness and uncertainty.
Sometimes, I feel like this is where most of life is lived.
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The darkness in the cavern was terrifying, even though I knew it wouldn’t last long. I was holding a child and I couldn’t see his face. The darkness was more real than anything else in the cavern. I was surrounded by people but all I could see was darkness. I used to think darkness was the absence of seeing anything, but I remember being able to “see” the darkness.
I no longer want to fix my own darkness or wish it away. Because not everything that happens in darkness is bad. Bulbs and seeds buried beneath the ground take root and sprout and eventually bloom. What would spring flowers be without a bulb buried in darkness? What would the sunrise be without the night preceding it? What would spring be without the cold, dark winter before it?
After watching an episode of Wallender recently, my husband and I learned that in some parts of Sweden in a particular season, the sun never sets. Twenty-four hours of sunlight. How wonderful! I thought. Then, he told me that the opposite is true in the contrary season: 24 hours of darkness. No, thank you.
I need them both, I think, the darkness and the light. Yes, I want to live in the light, but the darkness is where I have to be sometimes. Dreams, hopes, wishes, they die in the darkness, and that’s okay. Maybe they need to. Or maybe they just need to be buried for a while so something else will spring up in their place.
In a valley where the light is obscured, maybe it’s easier to see inside myself. The darkness forces me to focus on what I can feel and hear, instead of only on what I can see. Maybe learning to see in the dark is another way to live out our faith.
This post is part of a syncroblog to celebrate Addie Zierman’s new book Night Driving: A Story of Faith in the Dark. Click here to read more posts on this topic or to add your own.
