Of Light and Darkness – The Catholic Thing

Yesterday was the winter solstice, the point at which, because of variations in the way that the Earth orbits the Sun, night is longest, the “darkest day of the year.” (It’s also my birthday, and for some who have followed me over the years, I suspect, a dark day in a more than astronomical sense.) Maybe because of that accident of birth, I’ve always been struck by the line in Genesis, “And God said let there be light, and there was light.” I’ve even, in my wavering efforts to learn Biblical Hebrew, memorized the original, וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים, יְהִי אוֹר; וַיְהִי-אוֹר. Vayomer Elohim yehi or, vayehi or. Before that (if that’s the right way to put it, since time has not been created yet), God is winding up to deliver the pitch, so to speak. And he does in what follows: “God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.”

Many things depend on that division – though, as we’ll see below, not, ultimately, in the sense you might think. In a way, it’s no surprise that it was a Jewish scientist, Albert Einstein, who first discovered the fundamental role of light in creation. Nothing can exceed the speed of light in our universe. Einstein’s personal religious beliefs are a matter of debate, but is it wholly an accident that someone steeped in the Jewish tradition could have worked his way to that truth?

That whole tradition is with us, deeply, in this season. The birth of a baby is – or always should be – a cause for celebration. But that this baby entered our world around its darkest days is also surely more than a coincidence. People today tend to dismiss such speculations as “medieval.” But as in many of the paradoxes of the Faith, the darkness is not incidental or merely symbolic or even – we’ll come back to this – something left behind. In a deep sense, the darkness is also the reason for the season. Would light be so important without it?

If you think about it, too, why is it that Jesus was born at night? We only know that because the good Luke includes this detail: “Now there were shepherds in that region living in the fields and keeping the night watch over their flock.” (Luke 2:8) It’s fitting because the Jewish prophetic tradition suggests that night is the everyday reality in which we find ourselves.

In Handel’s Messiah, which you should make a point of listening to every year at this time for your enjoyment but also edification, you’ll hear a lot about God’s glory and how we should be thankful to Him for redeeming us. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.”(Isaiah 9:2) And why are they sitting in darkness?

At a live performance last week, the section that most went home was, “And who shall abide the day of his coming?” which Handel selected from the prophet Malachi (3:2). You would think that after all the darkness and suffering in the world, we’d all be glad to see Him. But the murky world that Original Sin and individual sins have laid upon us – and that we’re so attached to – is a world that we don’t give up easily. The Christian tradition reminds us that many of us will fear Christ’s Second Coming. Even at His First Coming, there were those, like Herod, and later the Pharisees and Sadducees, who didn’t exactly jump for joy at seeing Him.

We like Christmas, as it has become now, for obvious reasons. Gifts, parties, food, (Catholic) beverages, family, friends, good cheer, caroling, and at least minimal gestures of goodwill towards men. Even a secularist, rampant commercialism aside, might find all that a welcome respite from the grimness of the everyday. It’s all quite Dickensian. But for a Christian, the grimness goes far deeper. Which is why the joy is all the greater.

And yet in the end, perhaps we need to put in a good word for darkness. The darkness around us and inside in our earthly existence is, in its way, part of God’s mercy. Like all the trials and tribulations that stem from sin, as we see in Scripture, darkness is a spur to look for light. At Easter, we see why this babe is a great light. In the meantime, unless we take the full measure of the darkness in and around us, and why we need something to illuminate us from outside of us, the celebration is just another party.

But there’s even more. One of the greatest Christian mystics, St. John of the Cross, wrote The Dark Night of the Soul, which is in the form of a poem and commentary on the poem. Taken as part of a spiritual discipline, darkness can be a kind of door leading to what preceded even the creation of light, which is to say the Creator Himself. As St. John writes:

In a dark night,
With anxious love inflamed,
O, happy lot!
Forth unobserved I went,
My house being now at rest. . . .

O, guiding night;
O, night more lovely than the dawn;
O, night that hast united
The lover with His beloved,
And changed her into her love.

In the end, even darkness is not just darkness for God, but the original Being and contemplative silence that we can now reach, perhaps only through poetry.

As Charles Péguy has God say:

O sweet, o great, o holy, o beautiful night, perhaps the most holy of my
daughters, night of the long robe, of the robe of stars
You remind me of that great silence that was in the world
Before the beginning of the reign of man.
You announce to me the great silence that there will be
After the end of the reign of man, when I will have again taken up my scepter.
And I sometimes look forward to it, because man really makes a lot of noise.