Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again (gesture to encourage them to continue)
about your car’s extended warranty.
When Goddess finished creating the 24-hour cycle of alternating darkness and light, the angels asked hir what she was going to do next. She replied: “I think I’ll call it a day.”
A few weeks back we celebrated the Winter Solstice. For thousands of years people have celebrated Solstice as the return of the light. The idea for this service is to celebrate, not the light in the darkness, but the darkness itself.
Back in my twenties I read about the Brown vs the Board of Education of Topeka Kansas, the supreme court case that made segregation illegal. What impressed me most was the doll test by psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark. Asked to choose between a doll resembling a white girl and one resembling an African American, both white and black children chose the lighter complexion dolls, and many expressed negative associations with the darker complexion dolls.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out how consistently the word black was associated with bad and evil, how consistently the word white was used as an adjective meaning good or better. A web search today reveals that these pairings continue. One member of the worship preview group shared a poignant testimony with me that she had been led to think of darkness as the devil.
Although language contributes to our fear and aversion to darkness, there are clearly biological and evolutionary reasons for our orientation too. Humans have far more often died from exposure to cold (caused by less sun) than from heat. Sun light is the key ingredient in photosynthesis that provides us with the plant life that directly or indirectly provides us with our nutrition. More accidental injury occurs when visibility is poor. There are good reasons we like light and fear dark.
My goal today is not to destroy our bias toward light. By reflecting on nature; biology, reflexes, and culture, I trust this will lead us to revelation, choice and freedom. Freedom is a central value of our liberal religious tradition. The intention of our free and responsible search for truth is to advance liberation and empowerment of any and all humans.
From my early days in UU life, I found support to question and challenge language and dominant views. In the first time UU service I ever attended forty years ago, Dr. Virginia Molenkott shared her experience of participating in the creation of the first language inclusive lectionary. I set an intention that day that I would use only female pronouns and referents when referring to God. I did so because I recognized that using only maley language for G*d leads to harmful and distorted views of nature and life.
Historically women have been associated with nature. Rationality and a power with men. Society’s orientation and value of domination over nature has led to countless horrific incidents of violence against women and Earth. This nature conquering worldview is so engrained in our culture. I see it as the root of the greatest threats to human survival.
I began my practice of using exclusively female pronouns and referents for G*d in order to begin to counter the enormous skew toward conceiving of G*d as a man. I underestimated the difficulty of challenge involved in this spiritual practice. And I’ve found it to be powerful. I invite you to try it. You can do it, btw with or without a belief in the literal existence of a deity.
Attempting to embrace darkness, or find the divine in the dark will likely be a similarly difficult and productive endeavor. To begin this task, we must be willing to question the bias in our language and in society’s thinking about darkness and light.
Human preference for light, fear of darkness exists because of nature; biology and evolution and nurture; learning, social views, trauma and conditioning. Examining of these will support our efforts to gain consciousness. I love this about our religious tradition: our inclusion of intelligence and discovery for the purpose of empowerment and liberation.
The example of challenging the masculinity of God was not just a parallel. It’s part of today’s task. Seeing divinity as male has contributed to human bias against darkness. Women have been associated with the moon, and men with the sun. Thus the phrase “Father Sun, Sister Moon.” Society has called daylight and activity masculine. Men have been expected to go out into nature to extract resources and provide for our families. Night, passivity and receiving have been called feminine. Women have been expected to stay at home.
Could it be that our worldview is skewed toward a valuing of the masculine? Renowned Microbioligist Lynn Margulis suggested that Darwin and the Neo Darwinians that followed afterward grossly overemphasized the role of competition (“survival of the fittest”) and grossly underestimated the role that cooperation has played in evolution. Might the assumption that survival depends primarily on domination, tooth and claw be skewed and distorted?
Celebrating darkness might lead to us challenging society’s overvaluing of light and activity (especially aggressive activity.) It might lead us to reclaim the yin aspect of nature. Yin and Yang btw are Taoist symbols that reflect the light and the dark, extension and receptivity.
Could it be that humanity is out of balance in this regard? In our race to harness natural resources, we have created a society that values productivity 24/7/365. We want 72 degrees and sunshine. We want more bigger better. And too much is never enough.
Our own Sherri Philabaum wrote this book “Who loves the Dark?” (shows book). Last year she led a service and told us of the harmful effects that human generated artificial light is having upon our nocturnal creature kin.
What is darkness good for? What can we appreciate about darkness? Near the top of the list is sleep with all its benefits. Along with sleep is the fallow phase of biology and agriculture. We would do well to relearn this.
Capitalism often leads to overproduction that depletes or decimates the environment. Historically human food consumption changed with the seasons. We followed the seasons. Now we view the seasons and weather as an unwanted inconvenience and interruption of our established order. How’s it working for us?
Overfishing is an example of the greed our profit driven society. In the 90s industrial fishing, trawlers decimated cod, herring, and sardine populations. This also ended a way of life that existed for hundreds of years. By 2003 scientists reported that the number of large ocean fish was just 10 percent of preindustrial levels. And too much was never enough!
Life requires down time. Embracing darkness might mean our recognizing the value of sleep. We need sleep and rest for our health and healing. One example, Alzheimer’s has been linked to the build up of a plaque in the brain, and sleep supports the only mechanism by which that plaque is removed.
Sleep is valuable for material productivity. It is also important for the spiritual, the realm of soul, psyche, meaning, purpose and peace.
When we sleep, we enter a mystical realm called dreaming. Indigenous societies have valued dreams and other mystical realms. Indigenous societies have always included time for community, and to revere Great Mystery. Indigenous people have shared their food, stories, and dreams with each other. In our culture we suffer from isolation and alienation. We have viewed dreams as frivolous, and not real. We have viewed imagination and play as fanciful. We’ve considered “make believe” as what children do.
Our religious tradition has been skewed toward intellectual and other serious productive pursuits. More recently we have begun recognizing the power of “make believe.” We have grown in appreciation of kinesthetic learning; somatic or body wisdom. We’re relearning the value of play, down time and non-linearity in our religious life.
A sense of sacred darkness could take us back to a playful exploration of dreams and the art of make-believe. Certainly, we have had appreciation of western mental health. But we’ve followed a mental health industry skewed by mechanistic worldview that reduced people to chemical and genetics. We treated mental and emotional distress by seeking to obliterate it, often by violent means.
Indigenous cultures have had reverence for nature, the sacred dark and Great Mystery. Having an experience of altered states, that we would call psychosis has been a prerequisite for becoming a shaman, a healer. I wonder: if we transcended our fear of darkness and the unknown… if we met people with curiosity and acceptance, how many of those seen as having chronic mental health issues might become our great healers, shamans, or leaders. After all history has been filled with great leaders who had visions or saw a different reality from the norm.
I would like us to become mythopoetic in our search for truth and meaning and bring back dream circles. At the core of the practice of our liberal religious tradition is generous not strict holding of scripture theology and all things religious. We appreciate that symbolism speaks through a great diversity of religious traditions, stories, and practices.
I wonder if we could bring our open-minded mix of covenant and accountability beyond our walls. Could we cultivate humility, willingness to sit with uncertainty and mystery? Could UUs share dreams and learn together that way? Maybe we could experience the holy in the dark, in the unknown, in encounter of the strange and the stranger!
Carl Jung, pioneer of analytical psychology suggested the influence of the divine in our dreams. He suggested that humanity is influenced by collective unconscious, and archetypes that appear in people’s dreams. Archetypes refer to symbols, themes, images, and stories that have reoccurred across ages and cultures.
Jung’s concept of the shadow can help us with today’s task. He said that we construct a persona consisting of the qualities and ways we want to be seen. He said that we tend to ignore or repress whatever doesn’t fit with our persona. According to Jung, if we don’t face our shadow, the repressed parts of us come out in harmful ways including, projection, aggression and addiction.
Seeing the dark as sacred could help us to embrace uncertainty, unknowability and awe of the Great Mystery that we are a part of and that is greater than us.
On Christmas I spoke of how our biology interferes with our quest for peace. Our sympathetic nervous system evolved to protect us from predators. Our fight, flight or freeze mechanisms leads us to see threat, enemies, foreigners. Our aggressiveness and inability to cooperate might be the greatest threat to the survival of the species.
A friend and colleague Sarah Knutson has contributed to my thinking of how biology, perceptions, peace and conflict. She writes that our biology evolved in a world of predators and prey. We became oriented to the task of defending against perceived threats. Our cultures have been shaped by the orientation of our defense mechanisms. Our inclination to aggressive action has led to massive species extinction. It may now pose the greatest threat to human survival.
What if a reorientation with life could correct our obsession with productivity and heal our fear of the dark? What if our assumption that we must conquer nature could be replaced by a deep connection, a trust or awareness of oneness with life?! Could the scripture that says, “be still and know I AM (God)!” be the same as what was told in the story of the buddha’s achieving nirvana? What if cultures that affirm nature were on to something with their faith in the providence of Mother Earth?
What if we could pierce the barriers that keep us from facing all that is in us? What if we could learn to have down time? What if we could learn to curtail human aggression?! What if poet Albert Camus was speaking truth when he wrote “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer?” What if you didn’t believe or disbelieve anything I’ve shared today, and instead entered the dark stillness inside you and discovered for yourself what is there?
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