"The Longest Night"

The sun rose this morning at 6:50am. It will set at 4:45pm, giving us nine hours and fifty-six minutes of daylight, and fourteen hours and four minutes of darkness. By next week, when we mark the winter solstice and the longest night of the year, that number will rise here to fourteen hours and seven minutes of darkness. But who’s counting?

After that night, the swift turning of our tilted planet on its long journey around the sun will continue, the Great Wheel of the year will roll forward, and each dawn will bring with it another few seconds, and minutes, and hours of daylight. The sun will return, and the nights will grow shorter once again.

We are almost there, almost to the turning point of the year.

I know many of you, like me, struggle with the early darkness. It’s just plain disheartening to look out the window at 4:20 in the afternoon and realize that if I don’t get on my bike in the next ten minutes, I’ll have to break out the bike lights and move even more carefully down the dark streets of Santa Monica. As I told someone on the phone this week, the only thing worse than the dark is the dark and the cold, something I know our sisters and brothers to the East and to the North are weathering right now.

And alongside the gathering darkness of course comes the holiday season. Of course we mark this time with feasts and festivals, with a break from the normal routine. It can be such a magical time: gathering with friends and family to sing the familiar songs and carols, picking out just the right gift, reading Christmas cards, decorating the house or the tree. But just as the singers on the radio start dreaming of a White Christmas, I realize more and more how this time of year can really give you the blues. What other time than Christmas to look around the table and find there is no way not to remember, not way not to see the empty chair, the missing stocking, the one who isn’t here, but who should be. What other time than the holidays to gnaw over those old regrets, to feel that familiar sadness about a loss of contact and connection with family or friends. Somehow it seems easier at this time of year like no other to remember how things used to be, especially if they used to be better, easier, friendlier, more hopeful, more merry, more bright.

Which is all a long way to say, the gathering darkness isn’t just outside. Sometimes it follows us inside, too.

In seminary I loved the evolving traditions of an annual multireligious service called Seasons of Light. At the opening of the service, Kerry Maloney, the Director of Religious and Spiritual Life for Harvard Divinity School and herself an ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, at the opening of the service Kerry would invite representatives from every faith group on campus to bring a sacred flame to a central table. She called this a ritual of “kindling the fire at our center,” and it took place each year accompanied by a low drone of voices and synthesizer composed by the avant garde artist Meredith Monk. The piece was called “The Birth of Stars,” and the chapel would start out in darkness and music, until the light-bearers arrived.

During the years I was in school, the procession of light-bearers was led by my friend Anna, whose family celebrated the Swedish tradition of Santa Lucia. Anna would come into the darkened chapel wearing a wreath of candles, and from her light the Native American group would smudge sage, the Hindu students would light candles in front of Lakshmi and Ganesh, and then before the image of the Buddha another votive would be placed on the table. The Jewish hanukkiyah would be illuminated, all eight candles plus the candle that lights them, then the Advent wreath with its tall tapers for hope, love, joy, and peace. On this table the wreath was joined by a kinara, holding seven candles for Kwanzaa, and a Humanist Circle of Humanity. Among these symbols there was always a contribution from the Unitarian Universalist student group, who lit a chalice with enough alcohol burning in it that it looked like an emergency flare. Often the pillar of flame created by this chalice drew attention to the UU students, who knew to leave extra space for it at the table, lest its heat melt down the candles of other faiths. When I invited my minister to come with me to the celebration one year, he left with information about how he could order the pillar of flame chalice for his congregation. It really was quite impressive.

One year, as part of this service of light and hope, a service dedicated to marking “both the division and the unity of darkness and light, the holiness of time and place, and the triumph of hope over despair,” one of the students shared the following reading, from the writings of African shaman Malidoma Some, who writes:

I had light because I was not yet a real village person
Among the Dagara, darkness is sacred
It is forbidden to illuminate it, for light scares the Spirit away.
Our night is the day of the Spirit and of the ancestors, who come to us to tell us what lies on our life paths.
To have light around you is like saying that you would rather ignore this wonderful opportunity to be shown the way.
Villagers are expected to learn how to function in the dark.
I was given light because I had lost the ability to deal with darkness…

I wrote to my brother, who was living in Niger in West Africa at the time, with questions about how you could regain the ability to deal with darkness. He had been signing off his letters by noting the sun was setting, and as the light burned away across the plains by his Nigerien family, he needed to make sure to leave enough time to walk home before it got too dark to find his way.

Have you traveled in that kind of darkness? In our electrified world, it can be hard to find. I remember waking up at a friend’s farmhouse in Pennsylvania, bothered by the piercing light coming through the window. I was sure it was a streetlight, but it was the moon, luminous and rising, brighter than I’d ever seen it in my city life. I couldn’t believe it.

It reminds me, at this time of gathering darkness, that I have only to turn to the switch nearest at hand to cast away the dark. No matter how many hours of darkness there are outside, inside I don’t usually have to deal with it. I can banish it and stay up as late as I want. Most nights, after that 4:45pm sunset I hardly slow down at all, and as the darkness grows outside I turn on more and more lights inside, so I can write letters, cook meals, pound away at my computer, my face lit up with that unmistakable “green TV screen light.” On the longest night, as on any night, there is plenty I can do to distract myself from the darkness.

But this year might be the year when I choose not to turn on the light. When I wonder and wander into a time of gathering night with a sense of spiritual curiosity, with an openness to what might be growing and coming to be in the shadows. Can I regain my ability to deal with the darkness, to find my way without a light? What if this were a sacred darkness, a holy blanket of night that might offers comfort and rest, the gift of a renewal of the spirit?

In Hebrew the word for compassion is related to the word for womb, for our deepest insides. In that warm dark sea each of us is first formed and knit together, and when we emerge we are “inquisitive of air,” unfamiliar with light. Our first reaction to the bright lamps of a hospital room or even the burning rays of the noonday sun is to close our eyes and wail, to retreat back into that sacred darkness, the darkness from which we came.

On the longest night I remember how some conversations just cannot be had face to face. In the slumber parties of my childhood the giggles and gasps came from all around the darkened room, the stories and secrets that could only be shared under the comforting blanket of night.

Is there comfort for you in embracing the darkness this year?

Darkness in this culture is often a shorthand for the unknown. Instead of learning to lean into that unknown, instead of trusting the ancestors and the spirits to show me the way, I can get stuck at night, trying to quiet my mind into sleep, and instead locking into a perpetual review of the worries, the waves of fear or grief or anxiety, I kept at bay so successfully all day. In the darkness I am sader and weaker. In the darkness I am vulnerable and wounded.

If only those could be the moment when I could let “the dark embrac[e] everything
Shapes and shadow, creatures and me,
People, nations—just as they are”
In the words the poet Rilke.

In this embrace, perhaps, is not only my vulnerability, but also the chance to regain my strength. Reaquaint myself with hope, and restore my soul. In the safety of the darkness I can return myself to myself.

Hello darkness, my old friend, goes the old song. I’ve come to talk with you again. There are things we can see only in the darkness, as there are songs we can sing only about silence. How many of you have had to close your eyes to think better, to listen harder, to feel more deeply? Maybe the darkness is kinder than you think.

There is a bedtime prayer for Unitarian children that goes like this:

The sun has gone down and the friendly dark has come.
It is time to sleep.
Let me think over all I have done:
good deeds to do again, bad deeds to forego and forgive.
Now I shall sleep and grow while I sleep
And tomorrow shall be my new day.

I know there is a tradition in this congregation of welcoming the Friendly Beasts at the holiday pageant. Beasts, like the night, are not always friendly, but here we have made a space and a celebration for those that are. And so I am trying on what it would feel like to welcome the longest night, as a night of lamentation and memory, as time of rest and renewal, as a time of healing from each pull and pressure of the daylight, the electric light, and the screenlight.

Today I am welcoming the gathering darkness as a time of singing back the light, but not until I’m ready to leave the sanctuary of the warm darkness, not until I have regained the strength I need, not until I have laid my burdens down, not until I have made peace once again with this friendly dark, my first home in this life, knowing some day, too, it will be my last gentle sanctuary.

May it be so.