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
