The Fertile Darkness

In the mountains, snow is blanketing the earth with hushed white stillness.  The solstice is upon us, shadows have lengthened, days wane short, the earth’s pulse has moved subterranean—winter is coming.  For those who practice the Christian tradition, Advent is here, but the earth’s fertile darkness beckons us all.  Jew or Christian, Buddhist or Muslim, the silence offers to hem us all in.

It may be a fool’s ironic errand to write words about silence or to try to illuminate the nature of darkness.  Both must be encountered on their own turf, in their own language.  Wendell Berry wrote that taking a candle out into the dark night is an adventure in knowing the light. “To know the dark, go dark,” he urges. “Go without sight, find that the dark, too, blooms and sings.”  So let’s be frank about the utility of the following musings, as they are only pointing to something beyond words.  Read on, gentle reader, as you are wont to do, but then do yourself a favor and actually go out into the dark and silent night and experience the Mystery awaiting you there.

The entire human experience, from joy to terror, stillness to ecstasy is all available within darkness, but it is always shaped by this different hue.  So the following is not equating darkness with grief as much as to speak of how darkness engaged my grief, and I write perhaps as much for me as for anyone.  Perhaps it may be of some use nonetheless.

When I was in college, my beloved mother died of cancer, just before the holidays, at the age of 51.  For many weeks before her death, I would go out after midnight and wander around the University of Washington campus.  What was a bustling city of 45,000 students at midday became in the wee hours a ghost town of ivy-covered brick walls and empty courtyards.  Some things are impossible to attempt when the sun is high.

In those nights, I was just getting acquainted with the ways of grief, and the timbre of urgency voiced in my howls caught even me by surprise.  I was learning to cry like a man, full-throated and expectant that somehow my cries would pierce the heavens.  But looking at the moon, I often had the distinct feeling that God had turned his face from me.  The only answer to my cries were the echoes coming back to me off those brick walls…and between cries, the silence was deafening.  As my energy ebbed, the silence thickened.

Somehow, silence like this initially feels like absence, aloneness, darkness.  Yet we’re not really alone. That is just our experience of it at first. It’s almost like the god we imagined and believed in turned out to be too small for the moment in which we find ourself, and then poof, that false god evaporates like a mist. We’re left feeling an utter absence in the silence, along with a deep longing for a God who is big enough to meet our troubled times.  But just on the other side of this experience, if we hang in there, we discover such silence actually is a doorway to Utter Presence. A Great Being stirs, as Rilke says, and now, stripped of our too-small understanding of god, we can now begin to perceive this far Greater Presence for the first time.  

This Great Presence was always there (is always here, even now), abiding in the silence, hiding in the shadows.  We are the ones who are usually absent, filled as we are with plans, distractions, ideas—the busyness of life—until the time comes that we finally heed the call of night and sit in it long enough to settle down. Then, when we least expect it, Christmas dawns and light enters the caves of mystics and prophets in every tradition. We might say that all new birth of soul happens out of the grave of those possibilities that end up being too small for us.  It seems darkness is the best midwife of hope. She empties us out for something new, something that could not be born at noon.  

In Advent, folks are invited to turn aside for a time from the light; from clarity, certainty, and confidence; and hang in a deep, dark unknowing.  We enter the darkness of Mary’s womb. At the heart of Advent is the ache of longing, the not-here-yet of pregnancy that affirms both presence and absence. This fertile darkness asks us to peer longer and deeper into the nature of things, but offers no guarantees that we will see anything, nor that Christmas will ever come. The point of Advent is not in the seeing, it is in the looking. It is not in the finding, it is in the searching. Stay here until you are ripe enough.  You will know.

May these dark days be fertile for us all.  Let’s let Rilke have the last word.

You, darkness, of whom I am born—

I love you more than the flame

that limits the world

to the circle it illuminates

and excludes all the rest.

But the dark embraces everything:

shapes and shadows, creatures and me,

people, nations—just as they are.

It lets me imagine

a great presence stirring beside me.

I believe in the night.

~Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours

Translated by Joanna Macy & Anita Barrows