Befriending the Dark

Come
enter this room
this womb
this tomb
this vessel of darkness.
it’s not what you think:
no claws, no fangs, no poisonous drink
no monster under this bed –
only a pillow to lay down your weary head.

Here
where you can let yourself unravel
held by the comfort of its shadow
to ask what you need to ask
to cry what you need to cry
to show your true self without a seething, judgmental eye.

Come
let yourself be undone
listen for a wisdom unbleached by the sun.

Here
in this darkness you will discover
the dust you are made of
and all you could not see
in this cool whisper of night
where you were made to be free.

Do you befriend the dark? Whether it be walking into a movie-theatre, feeling the strange wonder of driving 30 meters under the sea level through the Westgate tunnel, or the way your eyelids close before a deep sleep, being in the dark affords a different kind of reality than being in the sun. One of the most beautiful examples of befriending the dark I’ve come across was driven by Jorge Spielman, a person with blindness in Switzerland, who thought it would be a fun to let his friends eat in the kind of darkness he lived with day in and day out. With his friends blindfolded as they ate, they were gob-smacked to find that the smell and the taste of their food was heightened in a way they had never experienced before. What followed was the creation of a restaurant that hired waiters with vision-impairment and blindness in a space without a single lightbulb or a crack of sunlight so that people with vision could experience the gift of the dark as well, a restaurant concept that has now taken off all over the world. But what about metaphorical darkness? Can we hold our inner darkness with a similar kind of curiosity and compassion? And, if we’re bold enough, can we let this kind of darkness become the place where we might come face to face with God? Because when I think back over my own life and the period of time I treasure most, it wasn’t necessarily the good times, the times filled with dazzling light and easy joy. It was a period of time that my doctors would name as depression, a depression that was brought on during a time where everything I once thought I knew about God and myself was like a rug that had been pulled out from beneath me, a spiritual darkness that seemed to eat me alive for nearly 5 years. And this is not to romanticize or gaslight the real pain I experienced or trivialize the kind of darkness experienced by those with clinical depression or any other kind of mental illness, but there was something about this time that deepened my faith even though it felt like God was nowhere to be found, a faith I never would have thought I had at the time but something I see now as the path that led me to where I am today. It was a darkness I can now hold with curiosity and compassion that has led me to hold subsequent times of darkness with a similar tenderness. A kind of darkness some of us might feel compelled to bypass, particularly in an Australian culture where we’re told to not make a fuss, that ‘she’ll be right’, and just to get on with things. But what often happens when we rush past pain with platitudes is that we use the term ‘faith’ to avoid the hard work of grief, anger, or healing. But befriending the dark, lingering in it and staying with it long enough to journey through it to the other side, might actually be where faith comes most alive. And it’s my suspicion that we come to today’s scripture through this kind of darkness where Nicodemus enters both its literal and its metaphorical shadow, bearing his life and his life’s work to the one who meets him in the cover of night. We don’t know much about Nicodemus. We only hear about him a couple other times in this Gospel, most notably when he helps to prepare spices for Jesus’ burial. But what we do gather from this now famous yet deeply vulnerable interaction is that he is a Pharisee, an intellect, a wise person who is well-versed in scripture and law, and he chooses to come to Jesus at night. Now, in preparing for this sermon, there were some scholars who remarked on how Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night because he’s afraid or ashamed of being seen. They attribute this to how the author of John speaks about light and darkness throughout the gospel as a kind of dualistic way of understanding faith, that light is good and dark is bad. And as much as this linguistic device has merit in John’s Gospel, I’m not compelled that this is what’s happening in our scripture today. After all, creation was birthed out of the darkness, Abraham looks to the stars in the night sky where God invites him to imagine the vastness of his offspring, Jacob wrestles with God during the night, it was the cover of night where Moses and the Israelites could escape their captivity, God calls Samuel in the middle of the night, Jonah spends three days in the darkness of a whale’s belly, shepherds experience God’s glory by night, and each and every human was knit together in the darkness of their mother’s womb. And perhaps, as a learned rabbi, Nicodemus knows the power of his tradition – the power of what can be revealed only by the cover of night where his courage and audacity to ask bold questions can fall from his tongue in a way the sun can be too bright for, where false pretences and facades are no longer needed and in the nakedness of night the soul can be naked itself. And so Nicodemus asks his questions, risks asking even stupid questions not because he’s spiritually weak or doesn’t have enough faith, but on the contrary because he longs, as his Judean forebearers longed in their moments of darkness, to truly know God. And there’s something about this night-time exchange where he’s able to lift the veil of his profession, break rank from his fellow colleagues, stray away from the expectations placed on him as a religious leader, and ask questions that are most pressing to him, exposing his naivete, his curiosity, and his need to know. Questions without which so many people across time and space would not be able to quote John 3:16. Questions to which Jesus is both stingy and generous in his answers – stingy in the sense that he doesn’t actually answer Nicodemus’ questions, but generous because what he reveals in these seventeen verses is a God beyond Nicodemus’ questions, beyond his framework of religion, and yet closer than his own skin. Seventeen verses we could spend a lifetime trying to understand, and yet like Nicodemus we would completely miss the point if that were our aim. Because these verses cannot be reduced, as so many have, to the famous John 3:16 as a simple arithmetic where God minus Son plus belief equals life after death. This scripture is doing something far more daring: revealing a faith that liberates us from the need to understand and the need to equate. This is what sits at the heart of today’s text, not a way to explain God or faith, but a way to deepen into unknowing God so that we might finally be free. A kind of unknowing an anonymous mystic wrote about centuries after Nicodemus stepped into the night in a book called The Cloud of Unknowing, a text that names salvation not as thinking or doing, but as unraveling. Not a loss of faith, but its deepening. A kind of faith we need more and more in a world addicted to truth, exposing fake news, being right, understanding, and control. An addiction that pulls us away from mystery, power, and freedom that could be experienced if we allowed ourselves to be undone in the presence of the unknown. An unraveling Nicodemus models for us: he leaves that night without clarity to his questions, but with a different kind of clarity, one only the dark could illumine. And we see that clarity later when Nicodemus appears again, not in the cover of night but in the aftermath of the darkest night, tending to Jesus’ broken body not in search of answers but bearing witness to what the dark reveals, the place where he meets God face to face. And perhaps this is what it means to be born again, not a cognitive decision made of our own consent, but a way of seeing differently, or rather more deeply, like eating without sight and discovering flavours we never noticed before, like stripping back our numbing and avoidance to hear our soul’s deepest groaning. Like Nicodemus coming by night and realising that what he thought was clarity was actually noise. The night is not a place to turn from, but a place to be transformed, just as it was when Spirit hovered over the waters where darkness covered the deep before goodness spilled across the earth, just as it was for Abraham, Moses, Jacob, Samuel, and Jonah, just as it was when we were knit together in our mother’s womb, and just as it will be when Jesus enters his darkest night. Because when we stop rushing past the grief held in our bodies, the fear left unnamed, the grasping we call certainty, and allow the deepest groanings of our soul to surface, the darkness becomes the place where we might finally see God face to face.