Worship

"The Softness of the Dark"

An Advent Sermon by Rev. Charles Blustein Ortman
December 12, 2010

Piano Introduction: Chorale by Robert Schumann
Part I: The Seasons Whirl…

The poet writes:

Fiery autumn fades to brown.
The final leaves so slowly
find there way to the ground.
Soft white cloud over head,
So soon comes sunset of red.
The seasons whirl, their cycles spun,
Just as birth…so death does come. --CB Ortman

In another poem, Sunset, Rainer Maria Rilke leads us further into this changing season and its darkness.

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,

leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs-

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

In an excerpt from his poem, "To Night," Percy Bysshe Shelley acknowledges the inevitability of the end of the day, even the end of days... He speaks of our ambivalence, our reticence sometimes to embrace that which is becoming.

Swiftly walk over the western wave,
Spirit of Night!
Out of the misty eastern cave
Where, all the long and lone daylight,
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
Which make thee terrible and dear, -
Swift be thy flight!

Death will come when thou art dead,
Soon, too soon -
Sleep will come when thou art fled; and
Of neither would I ask the boon
I ask of thee, beloved Night -
Swift be thine approaching flight,
Come soon, soon!

In an excerpt from, Meditation for the Season, my colleague David Bumbaugh wrote:

In late autumn, there are no secrets.
In late autumn, the world is what it is
and there is no time for pretense.
In late autumn, the days are short
and dusk comes early
and nights are long and dark.
In late autumn it is obvious
that light is not the natural state of things;
it is a transient phenomenon
in the midst of environing darkness.

In, A Ritual to Read to Each Other, William Stafford reminds us that often, to find the truth of it, we must enter our dark.

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider-
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

The queen of darkness herself, Emily Dickinson, wrote, We Grow Accustomed to the Dark. She suggests that with persistence, even there, we can, we will find our way.

We grow accustomed to the Dark -
When Light is put away -
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Good bye -

A Moment - We uncertain step -
For newness of the night -
Then - fit our Vision to the Dark-
And meet the Road - erect -

And so of larger - Darknesses -
Those Evenings of the Brain -
When not a Moon disclose a sign -
Or Star - come out - within -

The Bravest - grope a little -
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead -
But as they learn to see -

Either the Darkness alters -
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight -
And Life steps almost straight.

Piano Interlude: *** by Robert Schumann
Part II: The Seasons whirl, Their Cycles Spun…

George Ella Light writes:

I write this poem
out of darkness
to you
who are also in darkness
because our lives demand it.

Lord Byron picks up our theme in his poem Darkness.

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came, and went and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:

It can be ever so fearful to be in the darkness when it is a place we do not know so well. It can be maddening. To live in dread of what we do not know is to succumb not only to our demons, it is to forsake our saints.

A young poet I discovered on the Internet, who identified herself only as Emily, expressed her fears well in her poem, Darkness.

I'm swimming all alone in a pool of darkness
and I feel like darkness is slowly pulling me under
I yell for help but no one is there to hear it
I begin to see the water at eye level
and I kick and flail
fighting to stay above the darkness
But the darkness won't let go its hold on me…

We are all so fragile, unsure and often untrusting. We are also sometimes very alone and lonely. In her book , The Journey, Lillian Smith describes this darker aspect of us well.

"Without words, it comes. And suddenly, sharply, one is aware of being separated from every person on one's earth and every object, and from the beginning of things and from the future and even a little from one's self. A moment before one was happily playing, the world was round and friendly. Now at one's feet there are chasms that had been invisible until this moment. And one knows, and never remembers how it was learned, but there will always be chasms, and across chasms will always be those one loves."

To be with ourselves in the darkness is to be vulnerable. It is to acknowledge and accept our greatest pain and to bear witness to our greatest fears. To be with ourselves in the darkness is to love ourselves more fully, for all that we are and still can be. To be with ourselves in the darkness, to love ourselves in that kind of fullness, amidst the brokenness, opens us up, as well, to the possibilities of loving others in their brokenness and in their fullness. To deny ourselves leads to our denying others, or trying to deny others.

Our own poet here in the congregation, Bruce Kaduk wrote:

Human suffering is real.
Some obstacles cannot be overcome.
That which caused us pain cannot be erased.
But, as long as we have life,
we have the capacity
to understand
to search
to seek
to explore
to transform
to transcend
to create.

While we may well have need to travel into the darkness of our beings, it need not be yet another place where we get our selves stuck. We are on a journey through this life. To journey is to move on and to keep on moving. In the dark of our night we can still move on, or we can at least hope to move on, perhaps from sickness back to health, perhaps from fear to faith. Even on the worst days of our lives, the choices we make and the things that we do matter. William Stafford wrote, When you wake…

When you wake to the dream of now
from night and its other dream,
you carry day out of the dark
like a flame.

When spring comes north, and flowers
unfold from earth and its even sleep,
you lift summer on with your breath
lest it be lost ever so deep.

Your life you live by the light you find
and follow it on as well as you can,
carrying through darkness wherever you go
your one little fire that will start again.

Perhaps it is in the darkness, in the gentle softness of that darkness, where we can learn to let go of our demons and to embrace instead our hopes. In, Sweet Darkness, David Whyte points us in that faithful direction.

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.

In, The Gift, Maurya Simon offers still another perspective for moving from fear to faith.

The darkness is a rope, not a prison:
hand over hand I haul myself in
to touch your face, to blossom.

My fingers crawl toward heaven
leaving behind whorling shadows;
this darkness is a rope, not a prison.

I follow light through forgotten
canyons and grottos;
I touch your face and know

that even the sun has a mission:
as it climbs, it grows.
This darkness is a rope, not a prison.

not a cell from which I hasten.
Freely, hand over hand I follow
to touch your face, to open and open

like a night-blooming jasmine,
or a well widening with echoes:
this darkness is a rope, not a prison,
I touch your face, I blossom.

D.H. Lawrence travels deep into the darkness of the forest of his being. It is within the clearing deep in that forest where he finds the source of his faith, and even the strength to fulfill it.

"This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go… that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed."

Again from Bruce Kaduk:

To the extent that
a person responds to
the beauty
the mystery
the harmony
of nature,
to that extent
[one] has become part of
something that has always been,
something that will always be,
something that is eternal and timeless.

And in another piece he writes:
It is the questions that will live on.
Long after the debates on whether
the soul is immortal
the universe is immortal
pure thought is immortal
anything at all is immortal
have quieted down,
it is the questions that will live on,
it is the questions that will remain,
it is the questions that will achieve
true immortality.

It is the questions, we might conclude, that keep our feet to the path of our journey.

Piano Interlude: Figured Chorale by Robert Schumann
Part III: …Just as Birth, So Death Does Come

Edward Mills, editor of Evolving Times, wrote:

…I was thinking about the Solstice and this dark time of year.
With all the attention on Christmas and Chanukah and New Year's Eve,
the significance of the Solstice [the significance of the Dark]
can easily be overlooked
and forgotten.
It often feels as if we have pushed
darkness from our lives.
Even the darkest nights are filled with the glow
of digital clocks and night lights.
And when we wake in the dark of the morning,
the first thing we do
is turn on the light.
This pushing away of the external darkness
reflects a similar pushing away
of the inner darkness.
But it is within that darkness [where] we find our greatest gifts.
Jung said that our "gold" waits within the shadow.
In order to find and claim those gifts
we must be willing to enter the shadow.

Again, David Bumbaugh in, Meditation for the Season, writes:

In late autumn,
with winter coming on,
there are no secrets.
In late autumn, the world is what it is
and there is no time for pretense.
In late autumn, the days are short
and dusk comes early
and nights are long and dark.
In late autumn it is obvious
That light is not the natural state of things;
it is a transient phenomenon
in the midst of environing,
engendering
darkness.

Bruce Kaduk continues:
Creativity
is a communion
with
the deepest and
most authentic
parts
of ourselves.

To find those deepest parts, we make peace with our shadow, peace with our dark. In, I love the dark hours of my being, Rainer Maria Rilke writes:

I love the dark hours of my being
in which my senses drop into the deep.
I have found in them, as in old letters,
my private life, that is already lived through,
and become wide and powerful now, like legends.
Then I know that there is room in me
for a second huge and timeless life.

Theologian, novelist and poet Wendell Berry suggests to us to make peace with our dark, peace with ourselves, to find the softness, the tenderness of our lives, that we might hold them lovingly while they are all ours yet to hold. He writes:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light,
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

The medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart wrote:

This word is a hidden word
and comes in the darkness of the night.
To enter this darkness put away
all voices and sounds
all images and likenesses.
For no image has ever reached into the soul's foundation
Where God herself
with her own being is effective.

The Softness of the Dark (CB Ortman)

The softness of the dark
that meets us at the end of our day
and at the end of our days
is that same darkness and softness
in which we were each conceived,
and where we gestated,
and from whence we came out into the light.

It does not wait for us,
so much as it moves along with us,
especially close this time of year.

It is ready, this darkness, to hold us carefully and caringly,
when we are afraid;
when we have fallen;
when we are falling;
when we would dare to keep very, very still;
when we would have the courage to pray.
It is ready, this darkness, to hold us carefully and caringly,
when we would rise up again;
and too, when we will not.

So let us each be grateful then
for this time in our season.
For it is ours to either endure or embrace.
Let us be grateful then
for there is good reason
to hold what is in us, ere the end of the race.

The seasons whirl, their cycles spun,
Just as birth…so death does come.

There is a certain softness for us...
Just there… in the dark. --CB Ortman

Hymn: O Come, O Come Emmanuel