Darkness and Light Day 14

People committed to a spiritual path largely  identify with positive qualities like love, light and peace. For many Christians, light is superior to dark, peace preferable to disruption. We look for the light, long for light to win over darkness. Yet the Bible combines descriptions of God that are both light and dark, destructive and peaceable. 

I value how the Psalms are emotionally honest. Anger, grief, fear, joy, love, peace are all in these songs to God.  Darkness and turmoil are depicted in them- not only the inner struggle of the psalmist, but as danger and disruption originating with God.  Psalm 29 for instance  is a terrifying depiction of God's powerful voice- especially for us these days, earthquakes, floods, enormous fires are more than metaphor or hyperbole. And Psalm 18 has this astonishing description: “God made darkness his covering.”

We can't really think of darkness as representing evil, or necessarily opposed to God- in Genesis we are introduced to darkness well before we are introduced to  the story of the fall, in which evil, sin and death impact the world. The spirit of God hovers the dark waters where the potentiality of life was present.

This story causes me to think of how life emerges from the dark of space in the explosion of stars, or how  new earth and water enters our world from the eruption of volcanoes spewing heat and molten matter from the darkest depths of the earth. The darkness of the womb and the travail of birth is how most of us begin our lives. The darkness of disrupted ground is where plants are rooted and begin to grow. 

I think of the world today, in which so many are vulnerable with so much uncertainty and who are in need of real, courageous grace. Maybe we need more faith in the goodness of unformed times. Perhaps we need to remember the first lines of Genesis, of how the spirit of God hovered above the dark tumultuous waters and from there, began to create. 

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Image - Spirit by Yasuhiro Onishi - Acrylic on Plywood.