Dark Days

In the North we enter the darkest days. It feels like early evening all afternoon. For many these holidays are not bright with the Christall radiance of the newborn sun, but fraught with inward midnights.

Yet the mystics of all our wisdom traditions share one message about this fierce quiet onslaught of night. If we have the courage to embrace our unlit places, with absolutely no resistance, they deepen into boundless Being, softening like bruises, until they seep a mysterious glow. Grace chimes our bell-hollows. Night herself becomes the path.

Hindu devotees called Krishna "the dark Lord." His beloved Radha only found him after long nights of yearning. India's mystic poet Laladev cried, "Give me the daring to take hold of the dark!"

Islam patterns its mystical path after Mohammad's "night journey" (Isra), which leads to the mystical ascent (Miraj). According to the New Testament, Jesus did not become Christ by rising into light, but by descending until he "emptied himself." In Philippians, chapter 2, the Greek word for this experience is "kenosis," self-emptying.

"The divine darkness" was a common designation for God among Medieval Christian contemplatives. According to one of the least known but most important of them, Dionysius the Areopagite, true spiritual mysteries "are veiled in the dazzling obscurity of a secret silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their darkness." Wrote Blessed Jan Ruysbroeck in the 13th Century, "The unfathomable waylessness of God is so dark and wayless it encompasses within itself all ways."

"Even the darkness is not dark to thee," sings the Hebrew poet in Psalm 139, "for the light and the darkness are one." I have often said in my poems, "Darkness is not the opposite of light, darkness is the womb of light." Now I dedicate my prayer to all whose souls have been cast into this luminous night. When the darkness is most intense, the stars come out.

Painting by Toshiyuki Enoki