How to Make Friends with Darkness

“Your uncle spends most of his time, huddled darkness,  in a quiet room with a thick blanket covering his body.”

My uncle and I have the same genetic disease, Huntington’s disease.  Lisa Genova’s latest novel, Inside The O’Briens explains “it has been called the cruelest disease known to man.”  I don’t know.  For me, it’s just me and my family.  I suspect at Christmas time, everyone thinks their own family is the cruelest disease on earth.

More seriously, I have been unable to get that picture of my uncle, in the advanced stages of the disease, out of my mind.   I have been blogging about facing the elephants in the room, so this is one of mine.  How do I prepare myself for this future?

This fall and winter I have taken on some experiments to help me reframe this memory into something more positive.  I have been working at readjusting my approach to darkness.  Now, just coming out of the winter solstice – the longest night of the year – I want to share my finding with my friends.   This exploration has brought me deep joy.   But often, for me, such deep joy comes after a bumpy path.  Let me explain.

Letting go of wrong thinking about darkness

Somewhere from my Christian friends, I picked up a kind of Star Wars Theology.  White = good.  Black = bad.   Look at those words.  This has to be racist!  Too many of the ways of thinking and acting -developed by my faith tradition – come from times when racism was often unquestioned – by those who benefited from it. White male theologians explained things through their perverted lenses.  This is a way of seeing the world as dividing the world in two: white-black; light-darkness; good-bad; them-us; God on our side –devil on their side.  Basic insights about God and life flow from this black-white way of seeing the world. Go into the light; be afraid of the darkness.  White – light people good; black – dark people bad.

While the church has tried to let go of some of its most racist public stands (e.g. black slavery, residential school abuse), I believe it has not sufficiently let go of the imagination that created those evil experiments.  The black-is-bad; white-is-good way of looking at the world is still common.  Every night it gets played out over and over again on TV: criminals – bad; police/FBI/homeland security -good. Give the bad people what they deserve.  And so we get brainwashed:  white – good; black – bad.  Light – good; darkness – bad.

I’ve had to let go of this way of seeing and being.   If the darkness is bad then I have to be afraid of the picture of my uncle in a dark room, covered with the blanket, huddled in silence.  If the darkness is bad, then I have to do everything I can to avoid this path.

But I am done running away with fear. If I have any chance to embrace and enjoy the path ahead, I need also to be able to make friends with darkness.

Finding new metaphors of darkness

In my church, we often sit in darkness (at advent and lent) and anticipate the coming of Christ (Christmas).   Jesus, we were told, came as a light to the world. And so Christmas & Easter was a time of lighting candles to bring us and the world into the light of Christ.  Reading between the lines: we need to leave behind the darkness of the world.  Is it possible that this way of thinking comes out of the same kind of imagination as racism: light – good; darkness – bad?

Once you decide to embrace darkness a different world comes into focus.  I find this world more mysterious and more beautiful.  Most of life begins in darkness.  A seed falls into the ground and dies.  This is where life begins again: in the darkness of the soil.  Light is important.  We could not exist without the sun.  But darkness is also important.  We cannot exist without it.  Plants can’t exist.  Babies can’t be born.  People can’t sleep. Life as we know it would end if we had no darkness.  So if we look at the soil or at the womb of a pregnant mother, we see that we need the warm embrace of darkness for life to flourish.

So now when I think about my uncle, maybe he is returning to the womb – in a fetal-position, encased in the womb of a blanket, he lies in the stillness of the dark. Huntington’s Disease returns you to infancy – limbs moving involuntarily, completely dependent.  I heard that some aboriginal people say that old people have this tendency to return to the fetal-position – that is why the walk all hunched over.  Maybe my uncle is returning to the womb.  Is that what Christmas is really about?

Experiments in Embracing Darkness

Over the two months I have conducted two experiments:

1. Sit in complete darkness and silence for 30 minutes at a time. Extend as you wish. Repeat as necessary.  If you must think about something, think about the womb and ground you return to after death.  Extend as you wish. Repeat as necessary.
2. Lie in bed, in the fetal position, under the covers, in complete darkness and silence for 30 minutes at a time.  Repeat as necessary.  If you must think about something, think about my uncle craving this still darkness.

Findings & Reflections

First a poem.

On This Broken Hill

soaked in silence

bursting from mud

reckless beauty

sacredness without end

undeterred by

war’s blood

winter’s frost

and human neglect

the flower must bloom

erupting into beauty unleashed

even as humans kill

children starve

and the city-dwellers party

the flower blooms

its beauty needs no theory to justify

or a name to call it into being

it is already beautiful

how long until the humans remember,

they too are flowers

 

There are some things that can only be experienced in silence and darkness.   Now I anticipate sitting in darkness.  It feels like it enfolds me.  I can feel the hairs on my skin relax as they receive the darkness like a thick blanket.  Overstimulation is everywhere.  To me, it feels like a strong wind on raw flesh.  But darkness and silence have become good friends of mine.  I can reside in darkness.  I can build a home in darkness. I can abide in darkness.   In this stillness, I find my home.

Perhaps, I understand my uncle now.  Beneath it all there is a deep yearning for peace.   But it is more than a yearning.  A yearning marks the absence of something.  But those who have made friends with darkness and stillness know my uncle discovered a way to experience the fullness of peace.

Call to Action and Discussion

I dare you to create your own experiments to make friends with darkness.  Maybe you already have made friends with darkness.  Leave a comment below and tells us how.  Or maybe you want to push back on the idea of abiding in darkness.  Let me know what you think.