Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church--Unitarian Universalist

Darkness Visible

Rev. David Takahashi Morris

December 17, 2006

In any given year there is enough darkness to subdue the lightest spirit. You don’t have to be unusually moody or sensitive to feel weighed down sometimes; just a season of ordinary disappointments, personal shortcomings, and the discouraging news of the wayward world can take the wind out of our sails.

Sometimes, though, there is a heavier quality to the darkness. Perhaps this is such a time for you. Perhaps for you, this mornings’ news of the world has added onto a year’s accumulation of violence, savagery, deception and poor judgment when others’ lives were at risk and you’ve just lost the ability to believe there can ever be a time of peace or justice on earth. Perhaps some awful event or great struggle in your own life has devastated your reserves of hope.

Perhaps, for you, this truly is the longest night, the Winter Solstice of the spirit, and the light of hope is remote and seems no more than a legend.

In such a time, the surrounding jingle of the great American Happy Holiday can be genuinely painful. It’s an insistent call to celebration that feels hollow. If this is a time of deep shadow for us, the glow of warmth and good will can leave us feeling excluded and isolated. Joy to the world, in all its endless variations and repetitions becomes just one more part of everything that is weighing us down.

John Milton wrote these words in his great epic poem Paradise Lost:

A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv'd onely to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace [ 65 ]
And rest can never dwell. . . .

Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1

In Milton’s understanding, this was Hell: A world, a physical place—a landscape of eternal despair. Less than a century later our Universalist ancestors began to lead the world in reimagining Hell as something we create on earth—within our own spirits or in the world around us. We construct it in the world out of our fears and hatred and ignorance, or in our hearts out of our anger and loneliness and despair. Yet Milton’s phrase is still resonant. At times when our own light goes out, we can feel ourselves trapped in the painful dungeon, beset by flames that produce only “darkness visible”—a powerful anti-light in which somehow it is only possible to see the worst.

Modern writers have been captivated by Milton’s image of Hell. William Styron chose “Darkness Visible” for the title of a memoir of his own depression and near suicide, and describes with harrowing accuracy the experience of being unable to see anything good.

The darkness visible shows us so many things. . .

It reveals the cruelty and relish with which a nation at war can learn to delight in the destruction of the homes and lives of other human beings.

It reveals the uncontrollable rage that lets a man decide to shoot his own children, following a perverse logic of violence only he can understand.

It reveals our seeming powerlessness to heal the world’s wounds.

It reveals our own fear that if this love failed, then we must in fact be unlovable after all.

It reveals the desolation and emptiness of life without a beloved partner or parent or sibling or child.

In reveals the frightening incomprehensibility of life in the face of inevitable death.

The insidious power of the “darkness visible” is that the more we look at what it shows, the more convinced we can become that it is reasonable. It sheds no other light, it admits none; it has its own perverse rationality and it gradually leads us to wonder how we could ever have been so foolish as to believe in the silly notion that there is light and warmth and love in the world.

William Styron, writing of his depression, describes his sometimes tolerant, sometimes contemptuous dismissal of people who tried to make themselves his allies in the war against his mental illness. Friends, lovers, partner, psychologists and psychiatrists—they didn’t know; he was dully certain they couldn’t grasp the depths he was in. That’s Hell, to me—a place in which we become finally convinced that we are utterly alone in knowing that light is a myth, a fairy tale.

I have known that place. Perhaps you have too. Perhaps you are walking there today.

Light will return. It is such a foolish, fragile claim. When we are trapped in the darkness visible, when all we can see is the faithlessness and brutality of the world and the depth of our own despair, how small and fanciful the claims of faith seem: Jesus is born again within you. Mindfulness will awaken Buddha nature, the compassion and peace in you and in the world. God—Allah—the Holy One—does not forsake humankind. The sun will begin its climb in your spirit’s lightless sky.

In the lurid glare of the darkness visible it is all such nonsense.

And yet—it happens.

I have never believed that the ancient people who left behind our oldest rituals for Winter Solstice did not know that the light would return. Perhaps in the dimmest recesses of the past there was a time when the doubt and ignorance and fear were total; when the returning daylight was really seen as an unreliable whim that could be reversed at any moment. But I don’t think that belief was frozen in unchanging literalism.

I don’t mean they weren’t bothered by the fading light; winter is hard and dark and cold in the Northern Hemisphere, and these were fragile agrarian cultures that depended totally on the possibility of the next sunlit growing season for their survival. So the celebrations of Solstice were urgent and deep—it mattered that the sun was going to climb in the sky again. So the ancient people did something about it, and I don’t mean just bonfires and greenery and feasting and dancing, although thank goodness they did that too.

My own Irish ancestors, some 5,000 years ago, built Newgrange, a huge stone structure covered by a mound of earth in eastern Ireland. It covers an area of one acre, and has an entrance passage almost 60 feet long. It probably took about fifty years to build. Above the entrance way is a stone box that allows the light from the sun to penetrate to the back of the inner chamber at sunrise on the winter solstice. For three hours or so on the three days closest to the Winter Solstice, the inner chamber is lit by the sun. Every single year for the past 5,000 years. I think they knew the light would come. And they really wanted to notice when it did.

When the shadow is deepest on my spirit, I fall back on this old, old wisdom. We need deep subterranean structures within, where we can rest quiet and wait, where we can capture the first pale gleam on the first day of light’s return, shelter it, magnify it, and guide it into the deepest recesses of our inner darkness. When it arrives, it will help us again to begin to see what only light can show—that there are other truths to hold alongside what the darkness visible reveals.

The Sun has not gone; we just haven’t been able to see it. Even on the longest night, when our little part of Earth was turned away and leaning as far as possible into the darkness of space, the light was right there, constant and waiting.

In the worst depths of grief, love has not gone from the world. We may have lost the source we were surest of, but it is still all around us, waiting for us to find where to look.

Goodness has not disappeared from the planet, even in the throes of war and genocide. There are still those who act bravely from a soul of compassion for peace, for justice, for healing; we need to find them and add our light to theirs.

Life has not deserted us, even when despair becomes depression, and the darkness threatens our commitment to go on living. We can find a glimmer of light even in the courage to accept that we need help—from a minister, or a psychologist or psychiatrist, or someone else—and in the strength that gets us to pick up the phone and make the call, to get out the door and go see them. We can reclaim our life.

What power rekindles the light of our spirit? I can offer some possibilities, but I can’t answer that question for you. You must watch and wait and notice what shape it takes for you. However you name and recognize that power, it is the same as the power that makes the sun return: the deep trustworthiness of Existence.

Fragile and foolish it may indeed seem, in a time of shadow and trouble, to proclaim our trust that light will return. But it happens, again and again and again. Light keeps faith with us. Let us keep faith with light.

Let us each find our place of waiting, in the depths of the longest night.

And when that faint gleam of returning day begins to glow, let us shelter it and magnify it, feel its slowly growing warmth and study what it shows us. Then let us bring it forth for the world to see.

Let us tip ourselves away again from the darkness visible, and know: Light is reborn.