Sitting Still in the Darkness
By Rebecca Bowman Woods
Rebecca Bowman Woods is News Editor of DisciplesWorld Magazine, and a student at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.

Over the past few years, I’ve realized that winter may be my favorite season. Tell someone this though, and they look at me like I’ve lost my mind. I end up rationalizing it by saying “well, I love Christmas,” or “I love the snow.” But those aren’t the only reasons.

During winter, I’m focused, productive, and creative. I find myself easily waking up at 4:30 or 5 in the morning, with new ideas and plenty of energy, ready to work for an hour or two before the kids wake up for school.

Winter’s beauty is not lavish like summer’s, innocent like spring’s or wistful like fall’s. The beauty of winter is a quiet beauty – sometimes stark, like the empty branches against the sky. Winter is sometimes soft, like the play of moonlight off the newly fallen snow that can make it look almost as light as day. Some of the most beautiful sunrises and sunsets I’ve ever seen have been in winter.

But what I love most about winter is the darkness. Meister Eckhart, a medieval Christian theologian and mystic, wrote of a fourfold path. Via Positiva, the first path, is the light, the cosmos, all that is, joy and celebration. The second path, Via Negativa, is the darkness, the silence, grief, pain, the great void of nothingness, death. Both the Via Positiva and the Via Negativa are necessary, in equal parts, to bring us to the third path, the Via Creativa. In other words, new creation and creativity cannot be born only out of one or the other.

Think about the creation story in John 1:5. I prefer the NRSV, The New Revised Standard Version, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” I prefer this version, instead of those that substitute “comprehend” or “understand” for “overcome”. Unfortunately, I think we sometimes assume that the darkness was trying to overcome the light. Perhaps this was even John’s intention in writing it – how he saw it. We equate light with good, and darkness with evil, and we envision them as forces battling against each other.

I believe that it’s important to separate “darkness” from evil and let darkness be darkness. I’m not proposing that evil doesn’t exist or that it’s not a powerful force at work in the universe and right here on earth. Matthew Fox, in his recent book, “Creativity: Where the Human and the Divine Meet,” makes a very good case that evil has a lot to do with our refusal to be co-creators with God – either by actively using our creativity to destroy, or as is more often the case, not acknowledging it at all.

Freed from being synonymous from evil, where does that leave darkness? Without the darkness, the light would not be light. Life has many moments of darkness – pain, grief, experience of the nothingness. These are important, for without them, we could not appreciate the light, the joy, the celebration of life.

Think about how much time we spend running away from pain; being “scared of the dark.” We turn on lights. We desensitize ourselves with food, pills, and alcohol. We fill silence with noise. We fill our lives with busyness and the security of material goods. We turn on the TV and let its images fill our brains, rather than face nothingness.

Running away from the darkness makes for a shallow spiritual life as well. Praise and gratitude are less meaningful when we minimize silence and lament. Christian mystics, from Hildegard of Bingen to Teresa of Avila to Thomas Merton, all wrote of times of darkness, nothingness, falling, pain, and the absence of God.

I am learning to appreciate winter. Sometimes it’s difficult not to complain about the cold, but maybe the complaining, the lamenting, is part of winter too. Spring will come, as it always does, bursting forth with new creation, signaling that it’s time to let go of winter, just as there comes a time for letting go of darkness, pain and grief after embracing them. Until then, may we learn to be still and listen to the lessons winter is waiting to teach.

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