Two years ago, I traveled to Maine in the dead of December to visit a friend.
She and I had each had a hard year. That summer, she’d left an abusive marriage and I’d lost my third pregnancy in a row. We texted almost constantly in the weeks after, trying to bring each other comfort from our respective circles of hell.
“This is the hard part,” we’d say, each hoping desperately it were true. “It’s going to get easier. It has to get easier.”
But summer had come and gone, then fall, and one kind of hard had only morphed into another. The immediate crisis was just a ruse, it turned out. The real challenge was learning how to keep going after the early weeks of grief and rage had passed, once your soul had grown tired and hollow.
Maybe it was an attempt to sweat out the suffering, but we decided to go to a sauna in the middle of the wilderness. The area was so remote that there was neither street lighting nor cell phone reception. As we got closer, I watched the world grow black as our field of vision narrowed to just the car’s headlights, and my last bars of cell service tapered out.
Once we’d parked, we were led to a little cabin in the middle of a large field, which held the sauna. We were told to sweat it out as long as we could stand—then, when the heat became too much, step into the night air or cool ourselves in an outdoor ice bath, surrounded by snow.
We stripped our clothes, then sat in the blazing heat until our nostrils stung and our faces glowed hot as coals. Finally, when my skin felt almost painful to the touch, I stepped outside, gulping in the cold winter air as my eyes adjusted to the dark.
I had almost never seen a sky so full of stars. I leaned against the cabin’s railing, watching the steam rise from my skin before the Milky Way.
I drank in the dark. It made me feel less alone.
I don’t do well with the dark. I don’t like silence, either. For years during my infertility, I’d plug up my ears for every walk, drowning out any thought or feeling that might arise.
I’m sure I got this from the culture I’ve been swimming in for years. We as a society have done away with the dark. It gets in the way of the 24/7 cycle of productivity and consumerism on which we’ve built out lives. We use it as a synonym for ignorance or evil. Christians have given it a negative moral dimension, regularly praying to be delivered from darkness and dwell in God’s light. The sanctification of light has disastrous effects for all of us, from an unwillingness to sit with our own feelings to an inability to sit with others suffering. (Nevermind the harmful racial implications of rendering darkness as “lesser.”)
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Barbara Brown Taylor calls spiritual obsession with light “full-solar spirituality.” In Learning to Walk In the Dark, she writes about the years she spent avoiding darkness, ultimately realizing that her unwillingness—or inability—to grapple with the dark was caging her in. Expanding her world to make space for the dark emotions, experiences, and “lunar” understandings of the world might have made for fewer reliable ideas about God, but they ultimately made her understanding of the divine richer and more compassionate.
That was my experience, too. I might have tried to outrun my thoughts and feelings—but try as I might, there were some things I couldn’t blot out. My three pregnancy losses pierced through that well-constructed armor. Darkness became something I couldn’t hide from; she took up vigil in a corner of my soul.
Strangely, over time it grew comforting. That corner became the part of me where I felt most understood. In time, I came to experience darkness in a way I never had before. As welcoming, maternal; enveloping, reflective. Illuminating.
In Waking Up to the Dark: The Black Madonna’s Gospel for an Age of Extinction and Collapse, Clark Strand writes,
We are addicted to light and all that it symbolizes—certainty, the supremacy of our own power and our own knowledge, even the belief that all things can be “made clear.” Progress. Power. Perfection. Destinty.
My need to blot out all my dark thoughts and feelings during infertility was ultimately a desperate attempt to hide from the truth: try as I might, there were outcomes I couldn’t control. We humans may have mastered and subjugated our environments, but there are still areas where we must bend to the wildness of nature. No number of OPKs, temperature tracking apps, or fertility supplements could get or keep me pregnant. For the first time in my life, I had to face the reality that sheer determination and perseverence would not get me what I wanted. I was not in control. I was just one little person in a big world, dependent on many forces greater than myself for the thing I wanted most.
In that place of desperate longing, darkness was a comfort to me. Where “full-solar spiriutality” jumps to answers and cheerleading, the dark invites us into a ministry of compassionate presence. There’s a place for both; it was healing to have a friend say to me, “I really believe that one day, you’ll have a baby. If that hope feels too far away right now, I’ll hold it for us both.” But I also needed friends who could hold my hand and sit with my grief. The ones who crowded me in on either side of a two-person loveseat, wiping tears from either side of my face. The ones who dared to say: this is horrible. I don’t know how this ends. But I’m here, and I love you.
The dark of that Maine wilderness was a reminder of that, to me. Standing in the middle of nowhere, I felt held by the dark. Darkness sat with us in the moments where it felt we might never see the break of day again; bore witness as we tried to sweat the agony out of our bodies and came up gasping for air. She held a space for all our deepest wounds and desperate hopes.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.
I have never seen the face of God, but I like to imagine that he sometimes takes on the face of an inky-black night, freckled with stars, holding space for the dreamers and mourners. The darkness has gifts for us, if only we dare to receive them. Without the dark, we may never know ourselves, or God. Without the dark, we may never see the stars.
