CHS Sermons

Last Sunday after Epiphany
Melrose Chapel – 14 February 2010
Luke 9:28-36

We are in love with light.

For us, light means we are awake and aware, that we have clarity, that what happens around us and to us makes sense. Light brings us safety and comfort and convenience. We can make light stretch out a day — even to its full height of twenty-four hours if we want. Light is powerful, snatching us out of darkness in an instant. Light is necessary and light is beautiful.

Light feels good.

But darkness … well, darkness feels bad. It is unsafe, providing a convenient cloak under which evil deeds take place. Darkness invites nightmares and night terrors and things that go bump into our lives. It distorts reality, robbing our lovely Earth of all her color. You can’t even see the darned thing, which raises its scary quotient significantly. When you don’t understand, or are unaware, it is said that you are “in the dark”. Light “dawns”, but darkness sneaks up on us. At its best darkness is something we endure for the least amount of time possible.

Both our love affair with light and our hate affair with darkness have received encouragement from a mostly unchallenged religious framework. We celebrate the seasons and feasts of light, but save the dark work of unearthing our sins for Lent; we encourage each other to put our lights on lamp stands, yet no one tells us to show off our dark side; we remind ourselves that [bad] darkness cannot overcome the [good] light; we believe that Jesus came to be and to bring [very good] Light into our [very bad] dark world.

The transfiguration event is read more than once in our lectionary year; much of the preaching on this last Sunday of Epiphany gravitates around one of three topics: 1) the appearance of Jesus and his ancient confreres; 2) Peter’s silly attempt to prolong the event with the construction of booths; or 3) God’s pronouncement regarding Jesus.

But I believe the reason we hear about the transfiguration more frequently than other passages is not found entirely in shining faces or divine announcements or a perfectly natural desire to hold on to something good. I think there is a less obvious (and perhaps more crucial) lesson for us here, one that has to do with the aftermath of that day.

As was said yesterday in our bible study, you can’t live your whole life on a mountaintop — eventually you must come down. Jesus, and probably his disciples, knew that returning to their everyday lives might well end up badly. They left that mountaintop and began a journey into darkness.

I suggest the following:

• that life requires that we leave the brilliant light of reason and clarity and enter a world that includes darkness;
• that the awakened awareness of a mountaintop experience is not a goal to be attained — an end to be reached — but a place to be visited on our embodied journey; and
• that both are necessary.

Together light and dark comprise a unity; one completes the other. We are only whole (perfect) when we experience both. If it sounds like I’m about to present a case for humanity as essentially broken, fear not. What I do want to attempt is the restoration of an ancient perception of darkness — an understanding that could rehabilitate and reclaim the place darkness holds in our lives.

Cherishing light and shunning darkness has not always been the human way; in fact, it appeared relatively recently in our collective psyche.

How did this happen? We have a good working knowledge of why light is essential for life, but darkness? Not so much. Is there any possibility that darkness might actually be necessary for life?

We begin our search with the Universe itself: no matter how many stars and galaxies we see on a good night, we are always struck by the essential darkness of it all. We know that matter occupies less than 1% of the Universe. The rest we call “dark matter” or “dark energy”, partly because we do not understand just what it is, and partly because whatever it is, we can’t see it. But the sheer weight of its existence in the Universe indicates that somehow, in some way we do not understand, darkness must be necessary — very necessary — for life to evolve.

In the realm of visible matter, a solar system consists of spherical bodies circling a constantly shining star. I suppose it is possible that a sun-centered structure could have developed where planets always faced their sun, leaving their backsides forever dark … but that is not the case in our Universe. Each spins so that both light and dark make regular appearances. Even on this more local astronomic scale, a balance between dark and light appears to be a necessary condition for life.

In the current issue of “Tricycle” magazine [Spring 2010], Clark Strand [S] makes a convincing argument that the human species began to back away from, and eventually all but lost the value of, darkness when we invented the incandescent light bulb. Even though we were able to extend our days a bit with candles and gaslights, the light bulb set us free to push the darkness away thoroughly, and for as many hours as we wished. Before long, our tradition of sleeping in the dark and when it became dark, was squeezed into about eight or less hours a day.

The human pattern of sleep for hundreds of thousands of years was not an uninterrupted eight-hour stint. As the light disappeared around dusk, humans began to settle in for the night. When sleepiness occurred, one slept, no matter what “time” it was, and no one fussed about how long the sleep lasted. It began when it started and was over when it ended. This is an essential pattern of Earth; creatures sleep when they are tired, waken when they are not.

In the 1990s Thomas Wehr [W]studied humans to determine if they we have retained the circadian sleep pattern of our forebears, in spite of our modern-day altered sleep patterns. Each subject submitted to fourteen hours of darkness at night, and Wehr tracked their sleep patterns. What he found was amazing. Once the subjects had paid back a “chronic sleep debt” [W], they settled into eight-hour blocks of sleep. But the sleep hours weren’t consecutive.

When darkness set in, each subject would lie in bed quietly for two hours, and then quickly fall asleep. Four hours later they would wake again, rest quietly for two hours and once again go to sleep. Those rest hours turned out to be extremely important.

Strand tells us that they consisted of “a mode of awareness that was neither active consciousness nor actual sleep, but another state ‘with an endocrinology all its own [W].’” [S]

It is possible that this sleep-and-rest arrangement, available only when we allow darkness in its fullness back into our lives, provides a communication channel between dreams and waking life, and that alone is probably of great value to a species which no longer avails itself of myth and fantasy.

But Wehr learned something one more thing, and for me it changes everything. His subjects reported that during the day they had never felt so awake before. To verify this claim, Wehr used a standard test used by sleep labs to measure wakeful consciousness, and found out they were correct. In fact, these subjects were “more awake than the rest of us, more awake than modern human beings were ordinarily thought to be.” [S]

Wehr had unearthed the human “capacity for a consciousness that had … been allowed to wither away.”

Strand suggests that the tendency for humans in middle age to begin experiencing middle-of-the-night sleeplessness — which we think of as abnormal, another pathology to be “fixed” with chemistry — happens because we are supposed to wake up, not because we can’t sleep!

It seems we have traded true wakefulness for a “jittery hyperaltertness”, “fueled by caffeine, by communication technologies, by entertainment, by the sheer velocity of human progress, but most of all by light.” [S] It turns out that darkness, far from being a feared enemy, is the antidote for twenty-first century western wackiness.

Green, organic, natural, safe, easy, free, immediately available to everyone …

Well, who knew.

Jesus did; he gave his friends an amazing full-light revelation on that mountaintop, and despite their tendency to sleep that day, they were awakened in a way we have probably never experienced. When Peter fell into the trap of wanting to extend the light, the event ended — but not as a punishment; it was an instruction, a learning experience. Be careful, because if you cling to the light, you will end up losing the very thing you most want: true, holy, healing, satisfying, intense consciousness. And the way back to that kind of bright alertness is to release our grasp on light and to value, live, sleep and rest in darkness.

In its turn, shared with light, darkness may prove to be the missing link which, when rewoven into our daily lives, could transfigure the entire human species.

Well, just a little something to ponder in the darkness.