Lessons from the Darkness

We are deep into the season's darkness, hurtling toward the shortest day of the year. Our days will continue to shorten and our nights will continue to lengthen until the welcome solstice (Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 12:30 AM here in Baltimore). Then, the sun will cease its southern recession, pause and begin its northern trek again. On that day, night in Baltimore will last 14 hours, 35 minutes and 59 seconds. That is way too much darkness.

My interfaith study group has begun delving into the nature of night, as found in the Bible. We imagined that we moderns could not begin to know the full experience of night (how it could evoke awe, depth, terrors, thickness, cover, refuge) as did those who lived before the easy flip of a switch. Our experience of darkness and our fabulously easy ability to create light right here and now strips out the rawness of unrelenting darkness. Back in the day, the dark must have felt as much like a creature, a presence, as a duration of time.

So we are reading narratives of night in the Bible. We began with Genesis 1 - a good place to start.

When God began to create the heavens and the earth - the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep, and a wind from God sweeping over the water - God said, "Let there be light." And there was light. (New Jewish Publication Society translation)

Or, in the creatively faithful translation of Everett Fox:

At the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth, when the earth was wild and waste, darkness over the face of the Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters - God said, Let there be light. And there was light.

It is our good fortune to have both a sailor in our study group, someone who has logged thousands of hours on the water, day and night, and a theater director. So we read and saw this text through their eyes.

The beginning of time began in water and darkness. That was the setting: darkness and water. Imagine that, our director said: all darkness, all around. You can see nothing. You know nothing about space, place, orientation. You have no sense of what "here" is. You just sense your body but don't really know what it looks like. And then you feel a whoosh.

The sailor explained to us that not seeing on the water is different from not seeing on land. One's exposure, lacking of bearings, leaves one feeling vulnerable.

You can walk in the darkness, count your footsteps, feel the rise and fall of the land, find a tree or rock to serve as a marker. There is a way to ground and orient yourself, even if only minimally. Not so in the dark at sea. You can stay put on land, know that you wake up at the same place you lay down on land. Not so at sea. (Yes, there are anchors for larger boats in shallower areas but not for all boats and not deep at sea and not here in the story.)

Even more, our sailor told us, it is not the water that is most attended to on the open sea. It is the wind. Water is water, he said. It is when it is whipped up by the wind that you notice it and must respond. The responsiveness of the sails, sense of security, ease, confidence - all are determined in some measure by the wind. A sailor is ever attentive to the wind's speed, force, direction, waxing, waning. It is the wind that will determine the quality of the trip. And at night, in the darkness, exposed and drifting, the wind can feel like the whooshing, rishrushing of God.

With this understanding, the "rushing spirit/wind of God" takes on new resonance. In the midst of the chaotic, watery mass of creation, the text is telling us, there appears a constant, flowing wind that soothes and calms and fashions the world.

Perhaps even more, we can learn from this text that when we find ourselves adrift, afraid, in the dark, at a loss, we should pause, stay still, and attend to the spirit/wind that blows over the depth. Then, perhaps, the light will come.