Dark and Stormy

It was a dark and stormy night...  Actually, it is a dark and stormy night.  Really. No Edgar Allen Poe or ghost story here.  "Dark and stormy" have been on my mind on a metaphorical level as well.

It all started with teaching Chapter 8 in Luci Shaw's book on journaling titled: "Dealing with Your Difficulties."  It was a hard chapter to read but helpful.  Several of the class members said it was the most useful part of the book.  She writes about being honest with yourself about your emotions-- to pray and write about them before you do something you'll regret.  We discussed how hard life is.  I used to think it was personal, but I'm getting the sense that everybody gets their share of heartache.  It comes in so many forms.  But, it's so hard to walk through it instead of avoiding it.  There's a necessary degree of survival mode to dark times because some days getting to evening can feel like a miracle.

However, millenia of Judeo-Christian tradition tell us that there's more to darkness and suffering than survival.  Say, the Book of Job and Lamentations to go for the obvious.  The passion in all four gospels.  One third of the Psalms are lament.  A third.  And, according to multiple theologians the Psalms are the anatomy of the soul.  Our souls are one-third lament?  Here's the poem I put at the end of the hand out for the class:

“To Know the Dark” by Wendell Berry

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Then after teaching the class, I had a couple of potent conversations with several friends over a course of a few days.  My friends our dealing with some heavy stuff-- some painful difficulties.  I woke up at 4:20 on Saturday morning with Isaiah 50:10-11 on my mind (who knows what I was dreaming?):

Who among you fears the Lord
    and obeys the voice of his servant?
Let him who walks in darkness
    and has no light
trust in the name of the Lord
    and rely on his God.
¹¹ Behold, all you who kindle a fire,
    who equip yourselves with burning torches!
Walk by the light of your fire,
    and by the torches that you have kindled!
This you have from my hand:
    you shall lie down in torment.

There's a large part of me that wishes that there was something more than "trust in the name of the Lord and rely on his God" that God offers "him who walks in darkness and has no light." But, that's the gospel: our only hope is God.  There is no "more than." The Bible is no self-help manual.  

Back to the Psalms. Although a third of the Psalter is lament, all but one Psalm ends in praise.  Psalm 88 ends with "Darkness is my only friend."  But, every other one, even the most dire ones like the one where babies heads are getting bashed on rocks, end in praise and hope.  This literary structure is instructive: it really shifts momentum from the situation to God without dismissing the problem.  David got into plenty of pickles-- some really impossible ones.  But, he ended up finding comfort in the goodness and power of his God... who is our God. Darkness can be our friend if it brings us closer to God by ridding of our illusions of power and control.  Or as Flannery O'Connor who died of lupus at age 39 said, "We are all rather blessed in our deprivations if we let ourselves be, I suppose."