Why We Need To Praise The Darkness
“We are not here to curse the darkness but to light a candle that can see us through that darkness,” John F. Kennedy famously said.
I’m reminded of those words as we head toward the darkest days of the year. As a child I feared the dark. Much to my parents’ chagrin, I slept with the lights on in the rooms surrounding my bedroom. Thousands grow depressed each year when the daylight hours shorten. I too used to dread the dark veil of winter — until a profound experience of night changed that.
On a reporting assignment for The Wall Street Journal, I went one year to the Utah desert. I will always remember stepping outside in the evening and feeling embraced by a sky-full of stars. The specks of light seemed to endlessly unfold in a vast womb. It was the kind of sky our earliest human ancestors saw before our world became lit like an amusement park.
Until that time, I had always lived in large cities where a love affair with artificial light (26 million street lights in the U.S. alone) forces most celestial bodies into exile. In that moment in the desert, I realized there was far more to the night sky that my city eyes had ever seen. I was not alone in the night. I had countless star companions.
Since that time, “I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night,” as the poet Sarah Williams once wrote.
Over the years I’ve grown to appreciate this time of year when dimness grows dimmer, quietude becomes quieter and the winter chill forces us to seek corners of warmth.
I like waking in the dark before the street traffic cranks up and a stillness cloaks the neighborhood. I look forward to the earlier sunsets, beckoning me to put down my pen and shut down the computer as darkness descends.
While I enjoy Christmas lights as much as anyone, I’m also glad when my neighbors turn off their displays around midnight. December’s darkness is the counterpoint that reminds us we are called to be bearers of light, adding our light to sum of light in a world filled with struggle and conflict.
In her latest book, “The Stillness of Winter: Sacred Blessings of the Season,” Chicago author Barbara Mahaney describes winter as perhaps the most sacramental time of year because it inspires us more than any other season to lift ordinary moments into holiness.
“Live sacramentally,” Mahaney writes. “Sit down to a dinner table — even dinner for one — set with intention. Embrace all that’s slow. And with purpose. Light candles at dinner. Light the Advent wreath. And if you’re Jewish, blaze the menorah.”
December, Mahaney observes, is when God cloaks the northern hemisphere in a kind of prayer shawl. “December darkness invites us inward, the deepening spiral — paradoxical spiral — we deepen to ascend, we vault from new depths,” Mahaney writes.
Like the grand finale of a fireworks display, the December sky will offer a couple of rare treats that might help us forget for a little while the viral pandemic, rising death rate, economic stresses and societal divisions we are suffering through.
In the early morning hours of December 14, the Geminid meteor shower will peak, streaking across the sky as debris from a body called 3200 Phaethon burns up in the Earth’s upper atmosphere.
On December 21 — the occasion of the Winter Solstice — the planets Jupiter and Saturn will come closer to each other than at any time in the last 397 years. They will appear to coalesce into an intensely bright light — a phenomenon astronomers call a “great conjunction,” but others have christened the “Christmas star.”
Such events encourage us to revere the night sky more.
Have you ever had a profound experience of the night sky?
What are the ways you plan to make the darkest days of the year a sacramental time?
