LIGHTEN OUR DARKNESS

Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen.

I sometimes wonder what our lack of a proper night is doing to us as Christians. Physically, it doesn’t look good, and I have to imagine there’s a spiritual dimension to it as well. Unlike almost every generation before us, and unlike a substantial part of our present world, we have the ability to create for ourselves an unending daytime through the wonderful technology of the lightbulb. Yet it may be that our unexamined use of artificial light is affecting us more deeply than we would like to think. It may be that we eliminate nighttime to the peril of our souls.

The metaphor of night and day in the Scriptures and in the liturgies of the Church appear so often as to require our reexamination of their importance to the Life of Prayer. As Bishop Scarlett says in the Inquirers’ Class: “God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.” God created the division of time for the observance of significant events pertaining to creation, redemption and judgement. For many feasts in the Calendar, and most centrally the Feast of Easter, the celebration of the holiday begins in the darkness of the prior evening. We spend the first half of the feast-day in darkness into which shines the light of day. For those who’ve kept the Vigil of Easter Eve, the darkness in which we wait until the Paschal candle enters communicates the Easter mystery all at once in theology that is lived and breathed. Letting ourselves experience the darkness, abstaining from light for a time, teaches us a truth we could not know otherwise. 

I don’t want to be unfair to the poor lightbulb. It’s allowed us more control over the hours of the working day and gave us flexibility for seasons when daylight was in shorter supply.. But has it not also changed our sense of the objectivity of night? For untold generations, the sun went down and obliged a ceasing from labor. In terms of balance, we could not kid ourselves into thinking that the twenty-four-hour workday was possible. Each night was a reminder that all days end, and this proved fruitful for remembering that all lives must end as well. Each day was a practice in living well and dying well, of making good use of the time and then laying it down with humility when we must. Such a powerful analogy also taught us something about the spiritual life that as modern people we often forget. Take, for example, the poet Dante’s depiction of Purgatory. Even there, the souls preparing for Paradise must take a break at night and find a place to rest. The notion of unrestricted productivity and work is not a particularly Christian one and a mature Christian life will often involve periods of an apparent lack of growth. Such times are well-documented in the Christian tradition, and can very well be seasons of growth as we die to our addiction to tangible progress. 

But perhaps the most obvious quality of the darkness is the most important. Darkness is uncertain. We cannot see and we don’t know what’s out there. Darkness reveals our limits. If we’ll let it, darkness pushes us together and makes us reach outward to each other and upward to God. As the Psalmist says: “If I say, “Surely the darkness shall fall on me,” Even the night shall be light about me; Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You, But the night shines as the day; The darkness and the light are both alike to You.” The darkness makes us feel our frailty and makes us yearn for the light.

Surely, the author of the collect that ends Evening Prayer knew the kind of darkness which heralded the terrors without and the quiet vulnerability within. And we deceive ourselves into thinking we’re immune to it. A simple power outage leaves us in the state of our ancestors, clutching for candles and wondering if they’ll last until morning. And the same is true in the spiritual life. Darkness comes upon us and its greatest danger is that we’ll forget the light rather than yearn for it. The doubt and despondency that come with seasons of spiritual darkness tempt us to think that what we knew in the light was false and that light itself has died. But it’s not true. Night gives way to day; death gives way to life. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

Each time we say this prayer, we assent to an ending--we number our days and find in it the possibility of a wisdom beyond the cycle of night and day. We confront the end of the daytime and the night with the hope that even in the darkness God will be with us and will bring us to the new day. We do this together as a part of our common prayer to train our souls in the art of dying well so that on the world’s last night, or on our last night in the world, we can give ourselves into the hands of a loving God to whom the darkness is no darkness at all, and who makes the darkness of death into the light of eternal life. 

Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen.