Advent Daily Reflection 2020-12-10
John 12.35-36
Jesus said to them, “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light.” After Jesus had said this, he departed and hid from them.
I knew the church building of my childhood like the back of my hand. My father was a pastor and so both my parents spent full Sunday mornings at post-church coffee hours and elders’ meetings and potlucks. I attended for as long as I could but spent most of my time exploring the building. The church was filled with backstage wooden staircases, hidden closets, and doorways, invisible to the untrained eye. I loved to roam around in that church. One of my favorite places was a triangular closet, wedged beneath a stairway—a storage place for holiday decorations. It was completely dark. And quiet. I loved to crawl in there after service and listen to the gentle footsteps coming down for coffee hour and the muffled voices hovering above my head. I sat in that womb-like space and felt tucked into the church, wrapped in sweet darkness and the voices of my church family.
The darkness was not scary, it was safe and sweet. I needed it. I was sometimes overwhelmed by all the people, all the ideas, all the chatting. I needed that quiet darkness to help me come home to myself.
Jesus said “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness does not overtake you. If you walk in darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light”
Jesus does not speak about Darkness as a moral negative or with judgement. I think Western thinking can lead us (or maybe just me!) too quickly into binary thinking: darkness = scary, or bad, or far from God. But if we carry this bias into the text, I think we miss what Jesus may be saying. Jesus is speaking practically. In darkness you can’t see clearly-- you need something to guide you, something to orient you. As Jesus prepares his friends for his departure, he is acknowledging a reality, a human experience—there will be uncertainly, there will be unknowns, there will be change, there will be darkness. So he tells his friends to cherish the light, to memorize the light, to hold the light near so that when the unknowns find them, they will have comfort, a guide, and courage. I think Jesus’ call to his friends is a call to us all: become children of light—become students of seeing in the dark, become people who can remember what matters most in times of not knowing or of uncertainty, become friends with darkness, or at least acquaintances.
There are times we are meant to live in clarity, and times we are meant to live in ambiguity; but the paradox is lovely—sometimes it is in the ambiguity, in the seasons of not knowing, in the darkness--when one’s truth shines through with brilliant clarity. Just as we need to cherish the “light,” when the light is with us, maybe too we can cherish the darkness, when darkness is with us. Maybe there are moments we need to crawl into the dark, unknown, triangular closets of life and listen for the voices of love, coming from on high and coming from deep within.