Seeing in the Dark (Part 2)
Those words whispered by my Grandmother, “Keep your eyes open, my child, long enough to see the light in the darkness,” have given profound and unexpected shape to my way of seeing the world.
I hear those words now and I think, WOW!, but when I first heard them I just remember thinking, WHAT? It didn’t make sense.
How could a dark room have light?
What I know now, and what I quickly learned then as my grandmother sat with me and waited, is that it only takes a hint of light to fill a dark room. That room on that night, and nearly every room since, has always revealed the presence of light in the midst of darkness. What seemed like such curious and odd words in the moment now help me make sense of the world all around me.
It’s not just the rooms in our houses at night that strike us as dark, but for Christians living in a world that often seems strange and foreign, it’s the culture all around us that haunts us with darkness. What we sense causes us to be afraid; to withdraw; to enclose ourselves in familiarity and huddle around some notion of “light” and to name that which is outside of us as “darkness.” All the while, a world that seems dark because, well, oftentimes much of it is, actually brims with light.
It’s easy for us to lose sight of this narrative arch in Scripture. We often forget that vast and deep darkness exists at the beginning of Creation – that is, until God speaks and those light-filled words break through the darkness, giving birth to this world’s first dawn. That initial darkness is overwhelming and ever-present, its volume vast. Yet tiny lights (relative to the sweeping darkness) spread throughout the universe and begin illuminating the darkness until it finally gives way to the light.
Jesus’ first followers are acutely aware of this way of telling the creation narrative, yet they shift it from the cosmic and celestial framework to one that is moral and ethical in nature. Consider John’s testimony as a way of getting at this:
“The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
Darkness is not distant or confined to the depths of space; it is located all around us in all of its physical and spiritual forms. This is the beauty of the Incarnation, isn’t it? In Jesus, God offers us a new way of seeing in the dark by joining the heavenly with the earthly – the divine with the human:
“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).
Making such a confession invites us into a way of looking at our world that pushes back against the very thing many Christians advocate for today – namely a compartmentalizing of our world into clearly defined categories of sacred and secular.
Here is the trouble, however, with breaking down our world this way:
When we compartmentalize our world into simply the sacred and the secular we fail to honor God’s presence in all of the world.
Each time we hunker down we deny that God is the one who created this world, the one who sustains this world, and the one who has come into this world to dwell among us all. In short we fail to confess, along with the Psalmist,
“The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it” (Psalm 24:1).
When we compartmentalize our world into simply the sacred and the secular we fail to honor God’s presence in all human beings.
Each time we disengage with our surroundings we deny that God is the one who created our neighbors, the one who put God's very image inside each of them, and the one who has come into this world to save them.
When we compartmentalize our world into simply the sacred and the secular we fail to honor God’s presence in the things that human beings create.
Each time we cut ourselves off, wholesale, from the things being created in our communities and cities, and in the popular culture in which we live, we deny the creative longing each of us has to express things that are divine.
When we compartmentalize our world into simply the sacred and the secular we fail to honor God’s presence in our own lives.
Each time we fail to engage the world around us, we deny God’s call to join God in being the light to our little corner of the world. We fail to realize that we are to be co-partners in creating a world that is increasingly more reflective of God’s great light. We fail to understand that there is actually a way of being present in the world that is redemptive and capable of giving and receiving light and life with those around us.
So, may we learn to sit in the dark.
May we learn to see in the dark.
And may we learn the way of Scripture that teaches us to dissolve the false dichotomies of the sacred and the secular in order that we too may see and participate in God’s ongoing work of redemption and restoration all around us.
