Light in the Darkness

Dear Friends,

Today is the solstice itself, and we celebrate the turn of the seasons. The days will start to grow longer in our Northern hemisphere, so we can look forward to more light in every sense.

Yet there is another possible reading to the motif of "the light shines in the darkness" from John 1:5. It hangs on a different sense to the word "in." Maybe there is light within darkness itself, so it has no need of light shining into it.

How might that be? Well, there is no story without conflict. There is no healing without illness. There is no "journey back" without a "journey out." Why is the best American literature from the South? "Because we lost the war," answered Flannery O'Connor. So in that sense, we see how darkness may become productive if it prompts us deeply to reconsider everything, and so to find, invent, and intensify light.

We are not going to glorify, still less invite, pain and suffering, loss and crime, on the grounds that our response to them sometimes brings acts of compassion, community, and creativity. We can simply appreciate the miracle that, at times, our best forces are called forth by grievous trouble.

I want to go deeper into the darkness today, to find the light within one part of it: the darkness of not knowing. We don't know how the climate crisis will go. We don't know how the American or world democracy will go. We are called by our very not-knowing.

Our theme today is: "God so loved the world" (John 3:16). We may seem to understand it; we may get a warm or light-filled sense very quickly. But our challenge is to welcome, then set aside, every apparent understanding and so make way for ever new and deeper understandings. We want to plunge ourselves again and again back into the darkness of not knowing. It is the darkness of receptivity.

In the context of John 3, God loves the world enough to send a messiah. This love is an intensification of the repeated instances in Genesis (1:4, 10, 12, 18, 25, 31) in which God sees the world as "good." Sure, it was good at the start! The greater miracle was to still love it after the fallen millennia up to Roman times, in spite of everything that had happened in between. Today, we have even more everything to love the world in spite of.

If we can help one another to return into this darkness, not flinching from the troubled world and the question of how to love it, we will stand still with the sun.

with love,

Michael