Читать книгу Interrupted by God - Tracey Lind - Страница 11

I am a fool for holiday lights. I love the candles of Advent, Hanukkah, winter solstice, Christmas, and Kwanza. I enjoy seeing holiday lights as I drive through various communities, noting the diversity as I move from one neighborhood to another. I also like festive downtown office buildings and department store windows. And I even appreciate what some people call “tacky” Christmas displays—the bigger, the better, I say, setting aside for the season my concern over energy conservation.

I am particularly fond of a suburban home in Mahwah, New Jersey, with a decorated pond and a singing Elvis on the roof. But my all-time favorite was an unassuming cottage located across the street from a Fraternal Order of Police Hall in Cuyahoga Heights, Ohio. This cottage was so well lit that it could be seen for miles, even from the freeway. As we neared the house, there were literally dozens of people crossing the street, walking up the driveway, and paying two dollars apiece to ooh and ahh at the array of thousands of sparkling lights in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Among the various displays were an American flag, a jack-in-the-box, and a gingerbread house. There were numerous Christmas trees, choirs, snowmen, and Care Bears. There was a crèche complete with the holy family, attending shepherds, barn animals, and angels by the dozen. And of course, there was Santa Claus and his playful elves and reindeer. The entire display was constructed of twinkling, multicolored holiday lights. Christmas carols were blasting out of stereo speakers, and volunteers collected money for local charities.

As we walked away, I asked myself, what makes folks go to all of this effort and expense? Moreover, I wondered, what makes people like me travel a distance in the cold of the night to witness such extravagant displays of holiday cheer? The answer is quite simple. We need light. During the bleak midwinter, we human beings develop a craving for light. When the sun retires, we light candles and turn on artificial lights; when the trees are a leafless brown, we bring fresh evergreens inside; when the cold wind blows, we drown out its howling with music; when the harvest is over and the fields are bare, we feast; when the days are short, we party long into the night. No wonder we overindulge at the holidays; we’re trying to compensate for the dark and barren days of the winter season.

I love decorating my own home for the holidays. I look forward to putting candles in the windows and lighting the Advent wreath. I like the ritual of picking out and cutting down the “perfect” tree that is never perfect when we get it home. I enjoy the challenge of stringing lights on the tree, only to realize that at least half of them don’t light up when they are plugged into the socket. I love hanging the ornaments, especially the shiny red bulbs with gold crochet made by my grandmother. And I really relish the moment when we turn off the other lights and turn on the tree lights. If left to my own devices, I will play Christmas music on the stereo and sit and look at the tree for hours upon hours as it twinkles in the surrounding darkness.

One of the best things about my job as a parish priest is that I get to help decorate a really big house—God’s house—and then periodically sneak in for a private glimpse of several trees lighting up the darkness. I usually get the inspiration for my Christmas sermon during these private moments.

One year, on the day before Christmas Eve, I wandered into the church to turn on the lights and stare at the trees. As fate would have it, when I plugged in the lights, I found that one of the trees had fallen over. Unsuccessful in my attempt to upright the tree by myself, I went into the men’s shelter and recruited a helper. My plan to fix one Christmas tree turned into a few hours of readjusting all the trees, moving some sanctuary benches, and having a lengthy conversation about the real meaning of Christmas. Unfortunately, I came home perplexed about what I would say in my Christmas Eve sermon.

After dinner that evening, still in search of a Christmas sermon, I decided that I needed to buy additional lights to hang on the bushes in front of our house. I jumped in my car and with Christmas music blasting on the radio drove to the drug store. I ran into the store, bought a half a dozen boxes of lights, practically threw my money at the sales clerk, leaped back into my car, and drove home. After hanging the new lights, I plugged them in, and they didn’t work. I had purchased several boxes of defective lights. I tore the lights off the bushes, threw them in a bag, and drove back to the store, only to find a young man locking the door. “We are closed,” he said. “Come back tomorrow.” “I can’t come back tomorrow. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. I’ve got to work and I just bought these defective lights, and I simply want to exchange them. Please let me in. It will take me just a minute.” As the aggravated clerk shook his head and I was about to burst into tears, the store manager walked by, recognized my panic-stricken face, looked at the lights in my hands, and opened the door. “Come on in,” he said with a tired smile. “Let’s get you some working lights.” This kind man actually took the time to open the boxes and test the lights. As they twinkled, my face lit up like a Christmas tree, and I started to weep like a child. Embarrassed by my unexplainable behavior, I thanked the generous store manager and apologized to the disbelieving store clerk. I went home, hung the lights and climbed into bed—still without a Christmas sermon.

The next morning I got up, turned on the Christmas tree, sat down in front of it, and opened my Bible to the passage that is read in the dark every Christmas Eve just around midnight. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5). As I read those words from John’s gospel, I realized what was going on inside of me. I was trying to overcome my own darkness. I was doing my best to dispel the dark shadows of night from my own life.

I don’t like the dark. In fact, I’ve always been a little afraid of the dark, fearful of the bad and scary things that go bump in the night. I love going to the movies, but I don’t like sitting in a dark theater waiting for the film to begin, and I can’t stand watching the credits roll on a dark screen at the end of the movie. I enjoy dining by candlelight at home, but I don’t especially like dark bars or dimly lit restaurants. I don’t like sleeping in pitch darkness, driving down dark streets, or walking in dark woods. I didn’t like trick-or-treating as a child because you had to walk around the neighborhood in the dark; and as an adult, I am a passionate photographer who can’t stand working in the darkroom. I dread the short days and long nights of winter, and I get anxious when the sky darkens before a storm. If the truth were told, I think I suffer from light deprivation, and my deepest fear is being imprisoned in a dark and dreary cell or getting trapped in an underground tunnel.

That Christmas Eve day as I sat in my study still struggling with my sermon, I got honest with myself and admitted that it had been a difficult year, and I was stuck in the infamous “dark night of the soul.”¹ St. John of the Cross, a sixteenth-century mystic who coined this phrase, was plunged into darkness and despair when he was imprisoned for supporting a reform movement within his Carmelite Order. For nine months, he was beaten, starved, and confined to a monastery cell “with no other light than that which came in through the diminutive opening high up in the wall of the tiny cell.”² During his imprisonment, John of the Cross encountered the complete and total absence of God to the point that he could no longer pray.

Though I was not imprisoned in a dungeon or being tortured for my religious convictions, I was wrestling with the question of passing or claiming my faith. In the midst of the Episcopal Church heresy trial over the issue of gay/lesbian ordination, I was struggling with the institutional church and its tendency toward exclusivity, tokenism, scapegoating, and conflict avoidance at the cost of justice. I was engaging the deeper and more systemic issues of urban poverty and violence and found myself rethinking the role of the church in the city and my own ministry as an urban priest. Ten years out of seminary, I was running on empty. I was so exhausted that I came down with pneumonia and was confined to bed for much of Advent.

Darkness had intruded upon my life as an uninvited and unwelcome guest. I had journeyed to that place of emptiness, loneliness, and gloom where “the night [had stripped] away the surface of my world.”³ It had been a long season of patiently waiting, watching, and hoping for God to light up my darkness. And when Christmas was upon me, with no end to the darkness in sight, I had to do something to overcome it. I had to confront the darkness head-on without divine intervention. I had to light up my own world.

Over the years, I’ve looked back on that crazy pre–Christmas Eve with a modicum of laughter and embarrassment. What a fool I made of myself running into the drugstore at closing, insisting like a mad woman that I had to exchange my defective Christmas lights when those tired employees were trying to lock up and go home for the night. You would have thought that I needed a prescription from the pharmacy to save my life. Maybe I did. Maybe those lights were antibiotics to ward off the evil spirits of darkness that had invaded my soul and interrupted my life.

Darkness is not an evil spirit. Rather, darkness is a primal element. It existed before light. Darkness is the background, the underpinning, and the fabric for the quilt of creation. The Book of Genesis tells us that in the beginning, “darkness covered the face of the deep” (Gen. 1:2). Creation began in the dark of night. It was out of darkness that God gave birth to the rest of the created order, including light. And it is in the darkness of the womb that life is conceived.

According to Edith Hamilton, the ancient Greeks believed that “Long before the gods appeared, in the dim past, uncounted ages ago, there was only the formless confusion of Chaos brooded over by unbroken darkness. Night was the child of Chaos and so was Erebus, which is the unfathomable depth where death dwells. In the whole universe there was nothing else: all was black, empty, silent, endless. . . . And then a marvel of marvels came to pass. In some mysterious way, from this horror of black boundless vacancy the best of all things came into being. . . . From darkness and from death, Love was born, and with its birth, order and beauty began to banish blind confusion.”⁴ Was love trying to be born anew in me that long, dark Advent?

In most cultures, primal darkness is considered chaotic. The North Australian aborigines say that “In the beginning, all was darkness forever. Night covered the earth in a great tangle.”⁵ The poet John Milton spoke of the primal Chaos as “the vast immeasurable abyss, outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild.”⁶ And yet, the Bible tells us that God created both light and darkness (Gen. 1:5, Isa. 45:7). Was God creating something new in the chaos of my darkness?

The Fourth Gospel tells us, “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . in [the Word] was life, and the life was the light of all people” (John 1:1, 4). The King James Version reads, “The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:5).⁷ How about that? Both darkness and light were there in the beginning of creation, and yet the darkness did not understand the light. Was God simply doing a new thing in my life that the dark shadows of my unconscious did not yet comprehend?

This light, that enlightens everyone who receives it, was said to be the Word of God. It was the Word that was with the Eternal One when the world was created. It was the Word spoken by the Creator to human beings since Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden. It was the very Word that called Abraham and Sarah to birth a chosen people. It was the Word that rescued their descendants from slavery and led them through the wilderness to a promised land. It was the Word that became Torah, a new way of life. It was the same Word that, through the prophets and priests of old, disciplined God’s people when they went astray and called them to renewal and right relationship over and over again. But for reasons as varied as our humanity, the Word was not always heard and followed. And when the Word fell on deaf ears, the Light that accompanied it became dim and the world grew dark. Was God renewing the Word in my life and my darkness could not understand it?

According to Christian tradition, in the fullness of time, God decided to do something radically new: to send the Word, the Light, into the world as a human being. So on a dark and cold winter night over 2,000 years ago, a baby was born, and the Divine Word, the Eternal Light, came among us and became one of us. Jesus shared the Light and spread the Word wherever he went. He shed the Light on the poor, the sick, the outcast, the oppressed, and the marginalized. He shared the Word with both the powerful and the powerless, those living in the center and on the edge. He showed the way to all who would follow.

The scriptures tell us that he was received by some and rejected by others, so that eventually the wood of the cradle became the wood of the cross. At his death, the Word was silenced and the world once again became dark. But the essence of the Divine Light remained. God’s Word among us could not and would not be entombed by death and evil forever. Christ rose from the grave, and with him the Light ascended in the morning sky and the Word was heard again. Was God resurrecting the Light of the Word in me, and I could not hear or see it yet?

Throughout human history, the Word of God has been with us, and the Light of Christ has never been extinguished. It has dimmed in places of war and times of terror, but whenever we act in faith against oppression, hatred, and poverty, we echo the Word and rekindle the Light. Whenever we lead another to God’s love, we become a beacon in the night and a flashlight illuminating the way. Whenever we gather together to proclaim the love of God for the world, we become a bonfire of joy and a chorus of angels. Was God helping me to understand the contemplative, creative energy of the dark so that I could appreciate more deeply the Light of the Word?

That Christmas Eve I went to church for our traditional midnight mass. At the end of the service, the lights were turned off, and by the flicker of a single candle I read aloud from the prologue of John’s Gospel. As I said the phrase, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it,” I thought to myself, maybe the light did not comprehend the darkness either. Maybe it was a mutual misunderstanding between God’s two original beloved creatures. Maybe that’s where the original power struggle began. And then I settled into the darkness. When we sang “Silent Night” by candlelight in a darkened church that year, for one brief moment time stopped and the world felt safe. The darkness felt safe.

In the prayer book of the Anglican Church in the Province of New Zealand, there is a prayer to be said before retiring for the night.

Lord,

It is night.

The night is for stillness.

Let us be still in the presence of God.

It is night after a long day.

What has been done has been done;

what has not been done has not been done;

let it be.

The night is dark.

Let our fears of the darkness of the world and of our own lives

rest in you.

The night is quiet.

Let the quietness of your peace enfold us,

all dear to us,

and all who have not peace.

The night heralds the dawn.

Let us look expectantly to a new day,

new joys,

new possibilities.

In your name we pray.

Amen⁸

That Christmas Eve I realized that the darkness was not so bad. In fact, in the darkness my fears could rest in God, the quietness of God’s peace could enfold me, and I could wait for the dawn of new life and love to be born.

Each year, Trinity Cathedral hosts the Boar’s Head and Yule Log Festival, a Christmas tradition dating back to the fourteenth century at Queen’s College in Oxford, England. Following the great procession and adoration of the Christ Child, at the end of the festival, the Dean and a young sprite skip out of the darkened cathedral carrying a candle into the night. Some think this is cute, others believe it’s irreverent, and the most cynical say it’s downright hokey. Personally, as the one appointed to carry out this annual task, I take it very seriously and almost literally. It is not only my responsibility but also my privilege to bound joyously into the world with a child in hand bearing the light of Christ. What a perfect role for one who, as much as is humanly possible, wants to light up the midwinter night and sing out to remind the world that the Word of God is very alive. Sometimes as I skip down the aisle of the cathedral into the darkened night, I feel like singing, “This little light of mine, I’m going let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.”⁹ But instead I give thanks for the interruption of the dark because I now know that the two cannot be separated. Without the darkness, the light cannot shine.

Just Another Homeless Family | PATERSON, NEW JERSEY, 1998