Autumn is my favourite season with the softer light, glorious burnished colours of the countryside and crisp mornings. And yes, it can be wet and grey but perhaps I will appreciate this after the fierce, unrelenting heat and light of this summer. As I write this, meteorological autumn has begun (1st Sept). By the time you read this we will be in astronomical autumn (from 22nd Sept) and in my diary there is a note under 25th October which tells me that “Summer Time ends tomorrow”. This is when the clocks go back an hour, which may be good news for those looking forward to an extra hour’s sleep, but for some folk the increased hours of darkness to come will be less welcome, particularly for those who live with seasonal affective disorder (SAD).
Christians can unwittingly fall into a dualistic way of thinking about light and dark, equating light with God and all that is good and positive, while darkness is all about fear, suffering, sin and evil. However, it is one thing for light to shine in the darkness, quite another to obliterate it.
Pondering our responses to darkness, I was reminded of a favourite book I shared with my children when they were young: “The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark” by Jill Tomlinson. The chapter headings reveal that dark is exciting, kind, fun, necessary, fascinating, wonderful and beautiful. Do revisit this story or seek it out if you have not read it before. As is so often the case with a well-written children’s book, its simplicity and directness enable a fruitful conversation about a complex theme to take place at a much deeper level.
So what are some positives we might attribute to darkness? We only see the splendour of the universe in the darkness; darkness is necessary for a healthy circadian rhythm and the gift of sleep which restores and renews us. Sometimes it is in the half-light that our hopes and visions come to us, and although our deepest fears might surface in the silence of the dark, it is also there that God waits with us and holds us close. (I am sure you will think of many others).
And so I wonder… rather than rushing to turn on more lights to extinguish all traces of the dark, so that there is no risk of bumping into my fear, my doubt, my anger, my pain, my selfishness…aah, myself, perhaps I should embrace the gifts which the dark can offer, else I might find that in avoiding the darkness I am also avoiding God?
In his book ‘The Night Sky of the Lord’ Alan Ecclestone suggests “…there are some things that can only be seen in darkened skies, questions only heard in the silence of utter dismay. Such a time is ours” (Ecclestone 1980:39). Perhaps we might echo that such a time is ours too, and we might benefit from sitting in the stillness of faltering light and lengthening shadows in a spirit of questioning, maybe by a fire with a mug of cocoa, and discover who we really are without being distracted (blinded?) by the full glare of bright light. Maybe then we could rid ourselves of the God we have made in our own image and dare to encounter the true God with our true self. May you find comfort, contentment and peace in God’s embrace this autumn.
With love and prayers Rev. Linda Carter