Dark and Light: Winter Solstice, Hannukah, Christmas (1)

Dark:

The events of September 11 were a dark epiphany, a terrible revelation of what life is like if we do not recognize the sacredness of all human beings, even our enemies. Maybe the only revelation we can hope for now is an experience of absence and emptiness. We have seen too much religious certainty recently. 

~ Karen Armstrong, Spiral Staircase (NY: Random House, 2004), p. 303.

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In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. 

~ Dante Alighieri, Inferno: Canto 1.

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But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker. 

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (NY: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), pp. 17-18.

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Reading books has nothing to do with going to school, the two totally separate activities — reading, as being outside the classroom, and books, as being outside textbooks — so that what happens when reading books arises out of a kind of mysterious life power, which has nothing to do with any profit or gain. The experience of reading is like a well-lit road, illuminating the darkness during our brief existence, and at the end of the darkness burns a candle flame that can be called the zero point of reading

~ Bei Dao, City Gate, Open Up, trans. Jeffrey Yang (NY: New Directions, 2010),  p. 147.

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What had come out on top in Germany might occur in darkest Russia or the Balkans, but surely not in their law-abiding country. What had happened? That was the question raised on all sides, but no one had an answer.

~ Joachim Fest, Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood, trans. Martin Chalmers (NY: Other Press, 2012), p. 100.

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Theology has never considered discrimination because of skin color to be suffering. European theologians have never undergone this suffering as their own or as a part of Christian ethics or as a fundamental element in the quest for justice. The existence of dark-skinned slaves, men and women alike was historically of no great concern to Christian ethics.

~ Ivone Gebara, Out of the Depths: Women’s Experience of Evil and Salvation, trans. and intro. Ann Patrick Ware (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), p. 39.

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Certain kinds of writing and dreaming are intertwining things, like wild grapevine up the trunk of the plum tree: from the same dark soil, different fruits.

~ William Least Heat Moon, Prairy Erth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), p. 238.

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Opening the eyes is the job of storytellers, witnesses, and the keepers of accounts.  The stories we know and tell are reservoirs of light and fire that brighten and illuminate the darkness of human night, the unseen.  They throw down a certain slant of light across the floor each morning, and they throw down, also, its shadow

~ Linda Hogan, The Woman Who Watches Over the World (NY: W.W. Norton, 2001),  pp. 113-4.

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En una noche oscura,

con ansias, en amores inflamada,

¡oh dichosa ventura!,

salí sin ser notada,

estando ya mi casa sosegada.

~ Juan de la Cruz, "Noche Oscura."

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The stick of the blind man invents a new darkness.

~ Thomas McGrath, “The Stick of the Blind Man,” in A Sound of One Hand, Thomas McGrath Papers, Univ. of North Dakota.

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Five years later, I take a deep, shuddery breath to stop myself crying. It’s not just that I can’t hold Aoife again, it’s everything: It’s grief for the regions we deadlanded, the ice caps we melted, the Gulf Stream we redirected, the rivers we drained, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked with crap, the seas we killed, the species we drove to extension, the pollinators we wiped out, the oil we squandered, the drugs we rendered impotent, the comforting liars we voted into office — all so we didn’t have to change our cozy lifestyles. People talk about the Endarkment like our ancestors talked about the Black Death, as if it’s an act of God. But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through.

~ David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks (NY: Random House, 2015), p. 560.

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Hiding the dark places results in a loss of soul; speaking for them and from them offers a way toward genuine community and intimacy.

~ Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul (NY: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 148.

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Did I actually reach out my arms 

toward it, toward paradise falling, like 

the fading of the dearest, wildest hope — 

the dark heart of the story that is all 

the reason for its telling? 

~ Mary Oliver, “The Chance to Love Everything,” in Dream Work (NY: Grove Atlantic, 1986), p. 9.

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Old English blæc "absolutely dark, absorbing all light, the color of soot or coal," from Proto-Germanic *blakaz "burned" (source also of Old Norse blakkr "dark," Old High German blah "black," Swedish bläck "ink," Dutch blaken "to burn"), from PIE *bhleg- "to burn, gleam, shine, flash" (source also of Greek phlegein "to burn, scorch," Latin flagrare "to blaze, glow, burn"), from root *bhel-(1) "to shine, flash, burn."

The same root produced Old English blac "bright, shining, glittering, pale;" the connecting notions being, perhaps, "fire" (bright) and "burned" (dark). The usual Old English word for "black" was sweart (see swart). According to OED: "In ME. it is often doubtful whether blac, blak, blake, means 'black, dark,' or 'pale, colourless, wan, livid.' " Used of dark-skinned people in Old English.

~ “Black,” Online Etymology Dictionary (on black as the shining of all colors).

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We are groping around in the dark, like in a cellar, with only the feeble flame of our reason to aid us.  And along comes the theologian and blows out the light.

~ Katherine Anne Porter to a friend, according to Herbert Klein, recounting her words to Joan Givner, in Givner, Katherine Anne Porter: A Life (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1982), p. 258.

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Yet no matter how deeply I go down into myself

my God is dark, and like a webbing made

of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.

I know that my trunk rose from his warmth, but that’s all,

because my branches hardly move at all

near the ground, and just wave a little in the wind.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, “A Book for the Hours of Prayer,” in Selected Poems of Rainier Maria Rilke, trans. and ed. Robert Bly (NY: Harper and Row, 1981),  p. 15.

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The great narrative, to which we as Christians are called to be faithful, begins at the beginning of all things and ends at the end of all things, and within the arc of it civilizations blossom and flourish, wither and perish.  This would seem a great extravagance, all the beautiful children of earth lying down in a final darkness.  But no, there is that wondrous love to assure us that the world is more precious than we can possibly imagine.  There is the human intimacy of the story—the astonishing, profoundly ordinary birth, the weariness of itinerancy, the beloved friends who disappoint bitterly and are still beloved, the humiliations of death—Jesus could know as well as anyone who has passed through life on this earth what it means to yearn for balm and healing.  He could know what it would mean to hear a tender voice speaking of an ultimate home where sorrow ends and error is forgotten.  Most wonderfully, he could be the voice that says to the weary of the world, “I will give you rest,” and “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.” It is a story written down in various forms by writers whose purpose was first of all to render the sense of a man of surpassing holiness, whose passage through the world was understood, only after his death, to have revealed the way of God towards humankind.  How remarkable.  This is too great a narrative to be reduced to serving any parochial interest or to be overwritten by any lesser human tale.  Reverence should forbid in particular its being subordinated to tribalism, resentment, or fear.

~ Marilynne Robinson, “Wondrous Love,” in When I Was a Child I Read Books (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 141. 

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The dark has its own light . . . .

~ Theodore Roethke, “O, Thou Opening, O,” in Poetry 105,1 (Oct. 1962), p. 64.

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Beg for an inner occupation that will ally you with others doing the inner work. Find the wine most suitable for you. God has given us a dark wine so potent that, drinking it, we leave the two worlds.

~ Rumi, Masnavi, “The Many Wines,” in The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, trans. Coleman Barks (NY Harper, 2002),  p.  351.

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Perhaps, she thought, I am no longer in darkness, perhaps there is light and I have entered it. But she did not know what light exactly, nor what entering it would have laid on her by way of obligations.

~ Paul Scott, Raj Quartet, vol. 2: The Day of the Scorpion (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 205.

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I am black and beautiful,

O daughters of Jerusalem,

like the tents of Kedar,

like the curtains of Solomon.

Do not gaze at me because I am dark,

because the sun has gazed on me.

~ Song of Solomon 1:5-6 (NRSV)

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History teaches us that darkness and death take different forms in every generation, but the challenge of gathering the forces of light and love to oppose them remains the same.

~ Robert Lawrence Smith, A Quaker Book of Wisdom (NY: William Morrow & Co., 1998),  p. 79.

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I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.

~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden: or, Life in the Woods (NY: T.Y. Crowell, 1899), p. 137.