My experience with coronavirus in March of 2020 — and the weeks that followed inside my home in New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic — began to develop in me a new relationship to darkness. After George Floyd’s murder and an inspiring call by teacher Tanya Birl-Torres for all of us to become embodied abolitionists, I put words to something deep within that had been gestating for a long time.
In darkness, we are conceived. In womb-darkness we grow.
Our mothers’ bodies seek darkness in order to open safely, birthing us into being.
In darkness we rest.
Darkness of night — free from the light pollution human culture has imposed — opens our vision to the cosmos beyond our planet. Our universe is filled with rich, present darkness.
Only one of our senses experiences light; in darkness, all of our senses are heightened.
Darkness absorbs wisdom, and will share it too, if we are willing to rest our consciousness, spilling into darkness, a pool without reflection.
Darkness incubates imagination.
Darkness allows passion to find its source.
Why then do we use the metaphors of light and darkness in our worship spaces — over and over, without thought — always in the same way? To equate light with God, with good, with hope and with triumph. To equate darkness with evil, despair and ignorance.
We know why: Because humans — sometimes — are afraid of the dark.
No shame, this fear.
But this fear — a root — begets a harm: we project our fear onto that which provokes it and then confuse the one with the other. If we seek light out of fear of darkness, and feel a comfort, that does not mean that God is in the light, saving us from “the prince of darkness.” It means only that our desire for comfort wants to blast away that which provokes our fear.
Some forms of light can — and do — kill.
Light blinds.
We must claim our fear of the dark. And even, perhaps, for a time, rename our “dark side” our “white side.” Then — a difficult sacrifice I ask — let go of our treasured metaphors that have become embedded in our worship language. Can we have the courage to realize that when we use them — no matter our good intentions, or what we believe these metaphors “really mean” — we reinforce a lie and find false comfort in it. We equate symbols with truth and live accordingly: dangerously repeating the fantasies that have brought us here.
Can we stop using that language and see what emerges?
And, while we are at it, can we stop pretending Jesus was white?
Photo by Oscar Söderlund on Unsplash