Fine Lines

by Reverend Charles Stephen

“Above the generations, the lonely prophets rise,
while truth flings dawn and daystar within their slowing eyes.
And other eyes beholding are kindled by that light
and dawn becomes the morning, the darkness put to flight.”

These lines from the hymn, “The Morning Hangs a Signal” with lyrics by William Channing Gannett, 1840-1923, proclaim the glory of the light. There is nothing unusual there; we find ourselves frequently proclaiming the glory of the light, even today, when “We sing, when night is darkest, the day’s returning glow.”

We are much in love with candles, candles of memory, chalices, and holiday lights in our windows. Light is metaphorically a good thing. Images of daylight and its beauty flood our vocabulary. Light is good, and darkness is, well, not so good. Daylight is good, and nighttime is something to get through.

We talk about the “light of knowledge” and “the light of truth.” Once we talked about “the light at the end of the tunnel.” We are surrounded by so many positive images of light that night and darkness have no chance. And now we have entered our traditional season of lights, Hanukah and Christmas. The people who lived in darkness have seen a great light says a line from one of the Christian gospels. Hanukah celebrates events in the world of the ancient Hebrews that took place a century and a half before the birth of the modern era, before, that is, the birth of Jesus, whose birth we are told, brought light into the world.

Here we are, then, a week away from the solstice, which is the naturalistic foundation of our festivities of light, and the world – at least the world of the northern hemisphere – sees shorter days and longer nights. Ancient people might well have imagined that the trend would continue, until all the world was covered with night. I have begun to feel that of late.

It was not just chance that placed these two religious holidays at the time of the winter solstice. The Christmas legend tells of the triumph of the power of light, from the star that guided the shepherds and others, to the theological concept of the light of the world.

My wife and I and our two youngest children lived in England for six months many years ago, and by the time late October arrived, we were putting our two sons in the school bus at 8:00 a.m. each morning when it was almost totally dark and greeting them each afternoon at 4:00 p.m. when it was also almost totally dark. So I am as caught up as any among us in this celebration of light.

When my wife and I were in Maine in early October this year, the local weather man would end his daily report with statistics about how many daylight hours we had lost since mid-June, right down to the minute, and, I tell you, it got discouraging. But I think we ought to be a bit more tolerant of the night, of darkness, a bit more kindly in the way we speak of the absence of light. A song or even a sermon in praise of night and darkness would be most appropriate at this season of light. So this is it.

No doubt, night will never be as popular as daytime; thus it probably needs a boost from the pulpit, a sermonic defense of “la belle nuit.” Forget for a time such phrases as “the dark night of the soul” and give some thought to the gentleness of darkness and night.

Night is not simply an interval between two days, between yesterday and tomorrow. It has its own being, its own place in the scheme of things. Being intelligent men and women who understand a lot about the movements of the earth, we know why darkness happens. And yet, in our speech and in our moods, the role of night and darkness is denigrated. Shall we speak of the Dark Ages? Of black magic? Black lists? Blackmail? I used the word “denigrated,” and I have learned over the years that it comes from the Latin, “denigrare,” which means “to blacken.”

There are negative images associated with white and with light as well, but they are far outnumbered by the negatives associated with darkness and with night. Ghosts are white, for instance, but so are angels. White is associated with purity and innocence, but too much light blinds us, as any alpine skier knows. There are racial implications to all of this, as well, but that is for another time.

The Psalmist wrote that the light and the dark were both alike to God; but they are not alike to us; it is darkness and night that need our support. I take it to be a truism that each of us needs an element of mystery in our lives, of that which surpasses our understanding. Something beyond our reach, something that intrigues the imagination. The night sky will do it for many of us. A dark night, far beyond the lights of the city, will do it, a sky whose darkness brings forth the stars and planets.

To be sure, there is fear in the darkness, too. I remember talking to a fearful child once upon a time about how nothing changes in the dark. See, I put the light out in the room, and all is in darkness, and then I put the light on, and nothing has changed. That may be a way to deal with childhood fears, but, in truth everything changes in the dark – that is the appeal, the mystery of it.

Anyone who has walked in the night in the country or in the mountains or anywhere far from artificial light knows this. The night makes the world more spacious, more vast, and, surely, more mysterious. All things look different. The commonplace things of this world are transformed by this alchemy of darkness. There is no ugliness at night. An old Arab proverb, more than a bit sexist, no doubt, says, “In the dark, all women are beautiful.”

There is another Arab saying: “At night, all men believe in God.” I doubt that to be true, but it is true that at night there is mystery, the unknown, and the universe is full of wonderment. In the daylight, we see things clearly, or at least we think we do. A house looks like a house; a tree looks like a tree. In the dark, things change their shapes and take upon themselves any shape we can imagine.

Nighttime is, I think, difficult for dogmatic folks, for those who are overly self-assured. It brings everything into question, even ourselves. It tells us that truth can be concealed. No wonder so many religious folks over the years have railed against the powers of darkness.

Shakespeare may have written that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman, but that only creates more confusion about our attitudes about darkness and light. Be that as it may, there is nothing quite like a tranquil walk on a dark night to remind us that, although there must be basic truths in our universe, we don’t always feel too sure about what they are.

Think kindly thoughts about darkness. Night and darkness bring to our overly active minds and lives a bit of a respite. Nighttime can soothe and soften; it can gentle the harshness of our sometimes conflicted lives. Night is a thing of space and shadows. Louis Untermeyer’s little poem speaks of the world at night when only stars provided light as a place when “Earth, bathed in this holy light/ Is seen without its scars.”

Without the sometime garish light of day, the Earth can seem gentler, quieter. It is then, of course, when we sleep, when we gain that needed sedation. The ending of Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town is “The strain’s so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.”

Darkness brings us sleep, sleep that “knits up the raveled sleeve of care” and restores the body and the spirit, and enables us to begin each day anew.

We are quite small in the darkness of night. Walk abroad at night, away from the lights of the city and the only lights are those from distant galaxies and stars. Beyond the moon are vast distances, so vast, indeed, that we cannot really imagine them. And who can feel big when measured against such vast distances of space and time?

The constellations are unimpressed with my problems, my bursitis, and this sense of our own littleness, our own unimportance in the larger scheme of things is probably a good thing for you and me. How absurd our little problems seem in the dark distances of space. How petty our concerns. A strong dose of nighttime darkness can cleanse us, purge us of the clutter and the trivialities that accumulate during the sunlight of the day.

That lovely line from Robert Frost: “I have been one acquainted with the night” is one most night walkers can respond to. There is another poem by Frost that touches on this theme. (I have been working on a Frost lecture to give at a Lifelong Learning Institute course on biography that I will be doing in the early spring, so I am filled with Frost these days.) Here is his poem called “Acceptance.”

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud

And goes down burning into the gulf below,

No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud

At what has happened. Birds, at least, must know

It is the change to darkness in the sky.

Murmuring something quiet in her breast,

One bird begins to close a faded eye;

Or overtaken too far from his nest,

Hurrying low above the grove, some waif

Swoops just in time to his remembered tree,

At most he thinks or twitters softly, “Safe!

Now let the night be dark for all of me.

Let the night be too dark for me to see

Into the future. Let what will be, be.”

Walt Whitman wrote of “the tender and growing night.” And Keats, in his “Ode to a Nightingale” says “Tender is the night,” which F. Scott Fitzgerald took for the title of his novel. In the darkness, I am part of the world about me. “Darkness has divinity for me,” wrote an English mystic poet.

Others have said something similar. Here is Unitarian minister, A. Powell Davies, writing about Christmas: “In legend upon legend and story after story, Christmas always begins not with daybreak and the coming of morning, but at midnight. It was at midnight that the primitive observances began. It was the darkest hour of the night – not in the glow of morning – that the shepherds of the legend heard the angels sing.”

And, of course, the Wise Men were guided not by the sun but by a star. The legends have grown both beautiful and fanciful. Yet, they have never drifted out of the darkness into a premature daylight. They have stayed quite close to the inner truth from which they draw their substance: the truth that men and women must find their faith, not in the daylight, but in the dark.

In the bright light of our daytime hours, we can sometimes see for many miles, across a street or even a town, or, perhaps, from a mountain top, for a hundred miles. In the darkness of the night, we can see for untold millions of miles, into eternity even. One cannot imagine the poet writing, “I saw eternity the other morning.” Of course not. If eternity is to be seen it will be seen at night, as the seventeenth century poet, Henry Vaughn, had it: “I saw eternity the other night.”

I don’t know what eternity is any more than you do, but I do know that I am content that poets use the word. There is a sense of distance in it and a hint of mystery and of wonder and even awe. Those are good things to have as part of our lives.

To love the night and the darkness is not to forsake the value or importance of light. Someone once said of Mozart’s music: “Joy overtakes sorrow without extinguishing it.” That’s just about perfect. Night overtakes day without extinguishing it.

The days of our years are made up alike of light and of darkness, of days and nights. This little sermonic enterprise today tells us nothing at all that is new. It is but a reminder to us, as the Simon and Garfunkel song said, that darkness is a friend and deserves a better press. “Hello darkness, my old friend/I’ve come to talk with you again.”

Enjoy this season of light but remember that the owl of wisdom comes at dusk.