Trust the dark; don’t fear it.
Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year, so they say. A season heralded celebrated for being light and joyful, connective and communal. A holiday of grace and peace. But it didn’t start out that way. We’ve taken a nuanced, complex story and while yes, we have turned it into a celebration that is beautiful and good, along the way, we’ve forgotten how it came to be so. When you forget the why of something it loses its impact and becomes something it was never meant to be.
The Christmas story is a tale of struggle and hope, marginalisation and integration, oppression and freedom. It’s a story about what can come of suffering, trouble, unrest and strife. The scene of Jesus’ birth is filled with political unrest, social fracture, uncertainty, fear, and the expectation of harm. For all the glittering statues of mangers, sheep, and babies, we forget that Jesus was born in violent and uncertain times, from a woman whose body was in a precarious situation, in a country that was slowly bleeding to death.
Our love of light, our addiction to certainty, the narrow boundaries we’ve created for wonder, our capacity for pain, our fear of the dark - these have taken some of those messy and terrifying parts of the story and morphed them into something else, or forgotten them all together.
Let’s reclaim them.
LISTEN:
Faith happens in murky liminal spaces. Life begins in the dark.
Wonder cannot be pinned down to a particular shape or sound, colour or texture, seasonal holiday or date on a calendar. Wonder is only made visible by taking up space in the things and people and light and shade and sound and earth and material and matter around you and in you… and even then, it still lives in the unseen, as the foundation, underneath it all.
It’s as the writer of Hebrews said:
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”*
Can you even see wonder at all without having a little faith that it is there before you witness it? To find wonder you have to become an explorer of the unknown.
This series is about learning to trust in the dark again and how Christmas is the right time to do it. It is the invitation to life beyond sight and certainty, expectation and prescription. We will seek to reclaim the goodness of the dark and explore how even though the literary function of juxtaposing light and dark as a metaphor for good and evil has been helpful in the explanation of some things, it has relegated darkness to the other side of a dualistic plain in was never meant to live on.
We fear what we cannot see, what we cannot be certain of, what we cannot know, what we cannot put to shape and sound and visibility. We think the cure for this fear is to switch the light on, proverbial or otherwise - dispel the darkness. But when we are quick to rid our lives of the dark, we rid ourselves of the treasure it holds, the beauty and well-being felt and found within it, the glimmers ever present within it.
Darkness isn’t the problem; our desire for certainty is, our non-willingness to engage hard things is, our propensity for hyper-vigilance is. When you’re stuck in a spiritual loop of flight, fright, freeze, or fawn, the dark will always seem like a looming and large threat.
So we calm, settle, soften, breathe. Regulate. Remember. Re-member (embodiment). And find the courage to step into the darkness once more and learn to find its treasure rather than be scared to death.
Jesus was born to Mary, in a time of darkness, showing us that even in places we don’t dare to tread, blooms the energies of all that is good (the darkness is the place where treasures are forged and found); showing us that the dark isn’t inherently bad but is holy, good, and true, a place you can trust, a place where you’ll find joy.
WISDOM: “Here is the testimony of faith: darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day.” Barbara Brown Taylor.
* Hebrews 11:1
Much love, my friends, as you traverse this wild season.
See you in the App,
Liz Milani xo
Instagram: @thepracticeco
From this week’s series titled "In Dark We Trust," with a subscription in the App. Hope to see you there.
