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The Blessings of Darkness

The Blessings of Darkness

Last updated on: May 27, 2019 at 9:19 pm by Maggie Beaumont

The Blessings of Darkness 2019-05-27T21:19:16+00:00 Maggie Beaumont

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Light is not the only thing that is Good —

Darkness has its Blessings, too

Modern Western culture often privileges the Light as being better than the Dark. We have expressions like ‘black and white thinking.’ Mid-20th Century movies had the good guys in white hats and the bad guys wearing black. We speak of ‘seeing the light’ as meaning ‘getting the point,’ and ‘enlightened’ as better than being ‘in the dark.’

But darkness is not just the absence of Light; darkness is its own thing. Sometimes it’s essential – neither seeds nor babies can grow in the light, nor can wounds heal if held open — yet, for many of us in this hyper-visual culture, sometimes the dark can be pretty scary.

When people talk about religion, they often speak of “The Light” – of God’s love, for some, or just of ‘enlightenment’ for many. One thing that shows up occasionally as a critique of Paganism is that we’re not afraid of “the dark side” (with thanks to Star Wars).

The fact is, though, that at least in wild places far from the lights of people, walking in the dark can be freeing, if I wait until my eyes are fully adapted. Even starlight turns out to be enough to walk by, out in the open.

In between the streetlights of a small town, the dark is more difficult. The lights prevent my eyes from adapting, and the shadows are hard and dark, so I can’t see what I need to see.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

Emotional darkness is like that, too. When I can get fully adapted to it – when I can accept that the darkness I’m feeling is appropriate, necessary, and even useful — then I can see my way a bit. I can confidently step forward at a slow pace, feel my way into whatever work is being asked of me now. But when I try to ‘lighten’ the darkness, that has been a mistake, as if I were pretending, like TV sitcoms, that every human challenge should reach a happy ending in an hour or less.

I offer you two examples of experiences with emotional darkness: one when I resisted, and suffered as a result; the other when I went willingly into the dark, and the good that came from that.

Both my stories begin with grief, but obviously that’s not the only kind of emotional darkness.

My Brother

The first one was in 1968, when my brother Chuck was struck by a car and fatally injured.

I was 21 with a brand-new baby absorbing all my time. That this was the first death-in-the-family I could actually remember … completely escaped my notice. We drove to my parents’ house, did the things people do at a time like that. On the third day, we went to the funeral we had all helped to plan.

Somehow I had understood that the funeral would be a ceremony to “complete” the grieving process so everyone could get back to normal on the fourth day. So I was surprised, the morning after my brother’s funeral, to awaken with a raging fever and the flu.

In retrospect I think I made myself sick by refusing the emotions going on inside me. A newborn baby is not an unmixed blessing, especially at 2 in the morning, and my brother had been my closest friend since he was born. We had remained close even through our teen years, even after I married, even after he went off to college.

Now I was never going to see him again, but I wasn’t even acknowledging that fact, much less giving it the attention it deserved. I figured that since nothing I could do was going to bring him back, there wasn’t any point in thinking about it. “Loss” was just a four-letter word.

As you might expect, I had a tough time for the next several months. Made some unfortunate decisions, including a move across country that cut me off from the whole extended family. My mom phoned often, but my kids grew up with a grandmother they saw once every couple of years. They knew no uncles, no cousins. I missed the mini-reunions my friends had, getting together for drinks or lunches whenever they came home to their parents’ houses for the holidays.

Oh, I got the privacy I needed, some space from my mother’s clinginess – a symptom of her grief, and probably temporary, had I only understood it. But the whole experience of family gatherings was gone. That was a big loss in its own right; the cost of refusing to go into the dark.

My Mother

My other example was thirty years later. By the time my mother died, early in this century, I’d had a bunch of education in psychology and counseling. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had become a household name, so I had a better theoretical understanding of grief. There had been other losses over the years, so I’d had some practice.

Also, my mother was nearly as old as people in our family ever get to be, and she was frail, tired of living in her uncomfortable body. She’d done lots of completion work, made space for us to make peace with her. She said she was ready to die, and I believe she was.

Silly me – I thought that since everyone was ‘prepared’, when it happened, it wouldn’t hurt. (I guess you know how well that worked).

At least this time, when I began to have some ‘symptoms’ of grief, I was smart enough to recognize what was happening. Within a couple of weeks I started making room in my busy life for unscheduled grieving time.

I took long walks and long drives. I listened to sad music and cried. I journaled about the things that came forward to say, now that she was gone, even though I’d had plenty of time and said everything I needed to say while she was still here.

A year after her death, I did something that surprised me.

At Retreat

On an annual retreat, I found myself putting aside the work I had planned, and processing, again, the loss of my mother. And one day I walked into the center of a labyrinth and howled.

I sat on the floor and sobbed. I cried until I hiccupped. I thought I was done. I caught my breath. And then after a few minutes the crying started again, great gulping sobs. Sometimes I was thinking about things I would never do with my mom again, but mostly there wasn’t any conscious content to the crying. I just sobbed and sobbed.

This went on for an hour or more, until finally I was on my hands and knees, lungs rasping, belly sore from the hiccups, spent. And when it was over, I was really done. For the first time since my teens, I had actually cried out all the tears I had inside me.

Almost at once my life seemed more free and easy, less anxious, less compulsive. It had been important to do that work, to step down into the pit of all that grieving, to acknowledge that even though I was a mature woman of 55 when my mother died, I still wanted my Mommy.

Today I find I can’t really predict when emotional darkness will show up. There’ve been a few times, mostly gentler, in the years since then. What I know is that whatever pain I have found there has always been less horrible, and less frightening, than what I was afraid I would find. That the disturbance caused by my resistance has always been worse than the disturbance caused by doing the work.

And that the journey, while painful in the moment, has always been worth it.

The Light has plenty of value too, of course. When I feel myself in the grip of some new awareness, or when something has suddenly become easy, those are beautiful moments. But I’m guessing you already know a lot about those.

The Witch asks me if I’ve made it clear enough that Love and Grief are not opposites. I tell her I trust you to understand what I wrote. She laughs.

—

Author’s Note: Some of this blogpost was presented as a reflection in a Sunday service at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Princeton (NJ) in 2008 – in case there are two or three readers who are finding it familiar.

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