Are You Afraid of the Dark?

John Shuck

First Presbyterian Church

Elizabethton, Tennessee

January 22^nd, 2006

Winter Celebration

“The Way of Letting Go”

In the early 90’s I used to watch a television show with my kids. It was called “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” It was a children’s show on the Nickelodeon Network. The show was based on a group of kids called “The Midnight Society” who would meet at a special location in the woods in the night. Around the campfire they would take turns telling spooky tales. The episodes had just the right amount of scare. Scary but appropriate for kids. “Are you afraid of the dark?”

Why are we afraid of the dark? What is it about the dark that causes us to turn on as many lights as we can as soon as we can? Is it fear? If so, of what are we afraid?

Darkness has been associated with sinfulness or evil. The Gospel of John makes frequent use of the light/dark contrast.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” John 1:5

When Nicodemus comes to visit Jesus he comes under the cover of darkness in the night. Dark is the sneaky time. Darkness is for those who are covering their sins. According to John 3:19, Jesus says:

“And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”

The Gospel of John, notwithstanding, today our worship has sought to make the case for embracing the dark. Not only the dark, but the fallow, the solitude, the downtime, Winter.

Today we honor the dark places where the seeds germinate. We acknowledge with gratitude the dark time before the Universe began. We praise the holy one who in darkness “knit [us] together in [our] mother[s’] womb[s].” Psalm 139:13.

Today we affirm that the Divine is in the dark as well as in the light.

Today we celebrate Winter.

Today we celebrate “The Way of Letting Go.”

Growing up and having lived nearly all my life in northern climates, I am well-acquainted with Winter. When we lived in northern New York, we received on average 200 inches of snow per year. It was a gift to us from Lake Ontario. Lowville, New York was in a 20-30 mile north-south stretch that would be dumped on every year due to lake effect snow. You hear in the news about Buffalo and Rochester getting the snow. They are a bunch of whiners. They get in the news because of their population. It was in Lewis County, where you get the real snow. If you haven’t noticed we Winter people can be kind of macho and competitive. “Snow, you don’t know anything about snow. Let me tell about snow!”

Winter begins both in Montana and northern New York before Halloween and does not give way to Spring until May. A woman in my congregation struggled with Winter. It was too long and too intense for her. She asked me quite assertively not to have the congregation sing “In the Bleak Midwinter” when she was there. The line “snow on snow on snow” was just enough to send her over the edge. She had enough snow on snow on snow in her life without having to sing about it. I obeyed. We didn’t sing that song when she was in church.

In Montana, we have snow, but the big deal is the cold. Thirty below, forty below, and it seems to last forever. There are two seasons, winter and preparing for winter. When I was a kid I would dream about living in California; wouldn’t that be nice? But you know, one thing about living in Montana or in northern New York or other places where Old Man Winter likes to assert his authority, is that you survive by adapting rather than fighting.

When you are in the midst of a blizzard and the snowplows haven’t plowed the roads, you don’t drive. When your school or your workplace is closed due to bad weather, you take the day as a gift. Modern technology is a wonderful thing; it enables us to adapt and to survive the extreme changes of weather. Its downside is that we think that through this technology we can keep our lives the same through the seasonal changes. Fortunately or unfortunately, we can to a certain degree. That is, those of us at the top of the global energy chain, can. Regardless of whether it is winter or summer, we will do the same things, eat the same foods, keep our living space at the same temperature. If it is dark earlier, in the winter, no problem, turn on the lights.

As a kid growing up on a small farm in Montana, my life was more oriented toward the seasons than it is now. During the summers, my father would announce: “We are now vegetarians.” It wasn’t for ideological or health reasons. We raised beef. But we had a big garden and we ate what the garden produced when the garden produced it. During the summers, we ate fresh vegetables. When the chard was ready we ate a lot of chard. Same for peas, later corn, potatoes. Whatever we didn’t eat my mother froze or canned for the winter. We stored potatoes, carrots and onions in the root cellar. It was a cardinal sin to eat canned or frozen vegetables in the summer. I don’t know if we ever became totally vegetarian, but we did eat a lot less meat in the summer. I don’t eat by the seasons that way anymore. Most of us don’t, unless we have a garden that feeds the family. We can eat virtually whatever we want 365 days a year. We can eat McDonald’s hamburgers or fresh vegetables from Ingles whether it is January or July. Somewhere on the planet someone is growing the fresh vegetable I want and it can be shipped to me right now.

On the farm, Winter served as a friend. It was a break from having to work steadily outside. During Winter you had the opportunity to read a book. Winter was a time of rest. Now that I have an “inside job,” I tend to do the same things year round. Because of technology, those breaks and changes previously given to us naturally by the seasons, now we have to create artificially.

I am not advocating anything. I am the last person to tell you what to eat and when to eat it, or what kind of job you should have. What I am illustrating here is really a self-evident point: technology serves to level the seasons. It protects us from the ravages of nature. But it also removes us from the blessings of nature.

That is why I am grateful that our worship is taking into account the seasonal changes and the rhythms of nature. I want to shift now from speaking about Winter as a season to talk about the spiritual path of letting go for which Winter is a natural symbol.

There is something spiritually healthy about living our lives in season. Each of the four seasons has a particular spiritual orientation. This is not a new realization. This is quite ancient and across cultures.

Winter is related to the spiritual path of letting go. Winter is the time in which life happens in the dark. In the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks of this path: “Most certainly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.” John 12:24

The path of letting go may be awkward for us because it embraces those aspects of our lives that we tend to hide or to ignore or to medicate . We love the glory and the beauty of Spring. The colors, the light, the sounds, the warmth. Winter is too depressing we think. Winter is associated with aging, sadness, loss, and death.

When I was interviewing with the pastor nominating committee, I think they were worried that I was coming out for my face to face interview in the Winter. They wanted me to come out in the Spring when everything was green and alive or in the Fall when the leaves had just turned. But I came to East Tennessee about this time last year. I found it kind of amusing that the PNC was worried I might not like the area if I saw it in the Winter as if Winter was an ugly season or something.

Winter is actually a beautiful season. You appreciate that when you grow up in wintry places. But it is an acquired taste. It takes an artist to show the world the beauty of Winter. It takes an artist to show the world the beauty of a 90 year old. We tend to think of beauty as something that twenty year olds possess. But that is outward beauty--like a summer time tree in full leaf. Sure that person is beautiful, but that’s easy to see. Show me a person whose hands are worn from care and work and whose face bears the wrinkles creased from a lifetime of smiles and tears. That is beauty.

I get news from my former home. There have been a number of deaths in the Billings church this Winter. One was a good friend, Riley, at the age of 90 I believe. He used to tell me that he was on two journeys, a physical journey and a spiritual journey. He would warn us: “My physical journey is about over.” Then he would add, “But my spiritual journey is just beginning.”

There comes a time when we need to let go of our concern about outward beauty and our success and of our ego-centered journey, so that we can embark on that inward quest that connects us to the deeper beauty and wisdom of the Universe. Winter is that season both in its natural sense and its symbolic sense where we can experience the deeper beauty and wisdom of life. That beauty and wisdom can only come when we allow ourselves to experience those things that we normally hide, or ignore, or medicate.

I want to talk briefly about two of those things: grief and pain.

Grief or sadness is something we tend to want to get through or get over. And we certainly don’t want to talk about it. If others express sadness we feel the need to get them over it as well. When we let go, we let go of our need to control our feelings. We let sadness and grief express themselves. We let them be at home with us. Sadness and grief about our losses connect us with the pain and loss of others. We call that compassion. When we try to rush through it or medicate our feelings we lose the beauty and wisdom of connection with others and with our deepest selves. When we let go, we let ourselves feel our grief and sadness. We dance through it, moan through it, cry through it, write, draw, read, converse, meditate and rest through it. We own it. We claim it. It is ours. We have earned it. When it is time for sadness to go, it will. It will be Spring again, when it is time and not a day before it is time.

Pain is similar to grief. Pain, too, is something we tend to avoid or fix or medicate or at least endure. I am going to offer by way of illustration one way in which a friend of mine experienced her pain. Sister Mary is a Sister of Charity. She and I had partnered together in a couple of ecumenical ministries in Billings. She became a good friend. At one point, she was admitted to the hospital. So I went to visit her. When I knocked on the door of her hospital room, she invited me in. She was just about to celebrate communion with one of the other sisters. I said I would come back but she insisted that I celebrate the sacrament with her. She even asked me to pray. There we were, a Protestant preacher and a Catholic nun celebrating communion. What could be more sacred? Her hospitality did not end there. When we were alone we were talking about our various struggles and she said something that no one had ever said to me before. She said something to this effect: “I am going to use my pain to pray for you.” I had never heard of that before. It wasn’t quite like this, but it was as if the merit she received for her suffering she was going to give to me for my struggles. She was going to use her pain for my benefit. I was taken aback. I had never heard people speak of their pain in that way before. Even more astounding, of all the people for whom she could use her pain, she would use it for me. It was humbling and I was filled with gratitude for her. She demonstrated to me an important aspect of the spiritual life, and a difficult yet deep and profound truth. Pain is a gift. When we let go of the need to control or stop or even simply to endure our pain, we can let go of our fear of it and we can use it to serve, to connect, and to love.

Sister Mary, like many of my teachers in life, taught me that we do not need to fear the dark. We can embrace pain, sadness and loss. Because it is in these things that the Divine One is present—opening us to beauty and wisdom and life.

May you discover Winter’s blessings.

Amen.

ⁱ For further reading: Fox, Matthew. Original Blessing. New York: Jeremy Tarcher/Putnam, 2000.

ii Medicate” is used here in the sense of self-medicate which means using alcohol, drugs, or food in order to avoid negative feelings. I do not intended to suggest that physician approved medications to correct a chemical imbalance are not necessary.

iii See above.