Sitting in the Dark

Winston Sitting in the Dark

I remember listening to a sermon during a time of darkness in my life and hearing our vicar talk about the concept of “sitting in the dark.”  It was Christmastime, and with those words he gave me permission to do just that.  I went home, and I put some cushions together in a dark, quiet place.  My spiritual practice of “sitting in the dark” was born.

In a February 2020 journal entry, I put my feelings about “sitting in the dark” into words:  “I’m tired. I’m exhausted from worry.  It’s almost Christmastime. I am sitting in the dark.  The homeless encampments are full.  How many will spend the holiday on the street?  I want to be light and happy, but I’m tired and sad.  I’m sitting in the dark.”

We are coming once again into the Christmas season, the season of joy, and the season of light, but I want to bow to the darkness and acknowledge what the darkness brings into our lives.  In a culture driven by money, achievement, competition, and expectations of Pollyanna-like attitudes, we’re not given permission to feel the darkness within. To show our vulnerability, our immense self-doubts, our broken-heartedness with regard to the world we’re living in, just might “out” us.  How dare we dwell in a space of surrender, “defeat,” and quietude.  There’s too much to be accomplished, and so we resist making a place at the table for our deepest moments of sadness, disillusionment, resignation, and despair.  

Banish the darkness.

That’s the narcissistic paradigm that we live under “speaking.”  That’s the “voice” that tells us that to crumble is a sign of weakness. 

Let’s banish this cultural message instead.

I sit in the dark because I need the light, and I seek it.  I don’t buy into what Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor calls “full-on solar spirituality,” which makes no room for the darkness.  After one of the most challenging phases of my life as a mother, my spiritual director calmly said to me: “Alexandra, it is because of the darkness that we are able to see into the light.”

So I sit in the dark when I need to.  I sit quietly, sometimes in the austere cold of my glassed-in porch (with blankets), and I feel whatever is going on inside of me.  I invite it in.  I let it be what it needs to be.  I make friends with how the darkness is living into my life, and I just sit with it.   I give the darkness an honored place at the table of my life.

The darkness becomes my teacher this way.  Barbara Brown Taylor says it beautifully: “I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion.  I need darkness as much as I need light.”[1]

The spiritual practice of “sitting in the dark” leads me out again, eventually, into the light.

[1] Barbara Brown Taylor quoted in Carolyn Baker’s Dark Gold: The Human Shadow and the Global Crisis, (Universe 2017) 126.