Epiphany sermon: A Ray of Darkness
Isaiah 60:1-6
Before I came to Meadowood, I served a congregation of about seventy people in a beautiful small town known as "the town of murals" on Vancouver Island. I was a supply minister with a half-time appointment; the two years I spent there were counted as my internship. Their full- time minister, who was only sixty, was diagnosed with cancer and advised to go on medical leave. She took the diagnosis of cancer in her stride, but the medical leave was a bitter pill to swallow. She had started her dream job at Chemainus as her own first congregation, just two years before. The congregation were thrown off-balance by the sudden and devastating news. They went through uncertainty, not only as a congregation - many church members were struggling internally with their own grief, loss, and the fear of an unknown future. Among the congregation, four people regularly gathered for prayers every Tuesday morning downstairs at the church. (I want to tell you about them, so I’ve changed their names). Marg, her husband Nolan, Sheila and Heather faithfully ran the Tuesday prayer group, even during the worst of times.
I was almost at the end of my internship when someone told me that this small group wanted me to join them. I had prayed with them one or two times at the very beginning of my internship, and had made my excuses after that. Tuesdays were actually my regular office days; my office was right above the small room where they prayed. If I wanted to, I could have joined them with ease. However, I didn’t. They each had challenges in their lives: Marg’s husband Nolan had progressing MS (Multiple Scelerosis). Sheila had bipolar disorder. Heather, whose husband also had MS, looked after her sister, who was in the final stage of cancer. Their personal challenges weren’t what kept me away from the group, though - it was the way they prayed. I didn’t like their repetitive, lifeless prayer routine which began with a guided meditation by CD, with the same woman’s voice every time. What was harder to take was the way their intercessory prayers dragged down my energy. Led by Marg, the prayer group always seemed to have an endless list of who was ill, who was in pain, who was going to die. Their presence was warm, yet it seemed to me that they lived in a world where all the death, pain and illness in our town and in the world surrounded them, while I was bursting with positive energy.
One morning, a few weeks after I joined them, Marg knocked on the door of my office. We sat together. She said that she didn’t want to pray with the CD any more. (I welcomed it!) Instead, she would like to learn contemplation, the way of praying in silence. Then she asked whether I knew what it is like to experience so many losses in one’s life, all at the same time. One day, near Christmas, she counted how many family members and close friends she had lost within that one year. 22. And three more of her loved ones were getting close to death. She painfully confessed that she doubted that she had faith in God any more. If you knew her, you would find her confession very surprising; no one could ever see behind the rigid, strong persona Marg had built as she put aside her own pain to pray for the healing of others. Then I realized she never prayed for her own blessings, her own sorrows, her own life. The following Tuesday, I went down to the prayer meeting, bringing a book I treasure, written by Fr. Thomas Keating: Open Mind, Open Heart. It is a classic guide to the method of Centering Prayer. I read a quote from the book to open the meeting.
“Pure faith, according to John of the Cross, is a ray of darkness to the soul.”
“A ray of darkness!?”
Marg retorted, “Nonsense. How could darkness have a ray?”
And that’s how the reformation of the Tuesday morning prayer group started - with a controversial new idea.
Marg and I got to know each other from that moment on, on Tuesday mornings and through a few private pastoral visits. Then I had to leave the congregation as my appointment ended. During the last days of my ministry there, we expressed our sorrows on parting. We said to each other, If we had more time, we could have become really good friends. Even though I was much younger than Marg, I could spiritually accompany her with teaching contemplation and supporting her with spiritual direction. She could give me an opportunity to ponder together with her the answer to how ‘a ray of darkness’ can ever be possible in our life and faith journey.
In the Christian mysticism tradition, “darkness” often symbolizes the spiritual status where we can neither feel nor sense God’s presence in our life, in our soul, in our being. It is also expressed as the “dark night of the soul”. It is the experience of the absence of God in one’s life, total disconnection from God, the feeling of being left out, forgotten and abandoned. It may be caused by hardships and difficulties in one’s life, but the spiritual status, expressed as ‘night’, can also happen to a spiritually advanced person.
My conversations with Marg showed me that even though she willingly offered her physical, pastoral presence in the midst of the pains of others, her family members and her neighbours, her inner self was actually pretty frightened. She was scared by the fact that she did not know what would happen next. Marg was scared of ‘night’, ‘darkness’ in their symbolic meanings. Darkness was, to her, an enemy; it could never be a friend. In addition, I remember she once said to me that she believed everything has a flaw (I think that’s what she meant by ‘sin’). Everything has a flaw. Evil is quite real. She was doubtful that the world could be changed to be a better one, seeing all the terrible things happening to the most vulnerable in our world. And I thought, “the meaning of death, to her, is punishment.” If death is punishment, it makes it easier to understand how she experiences all the losses in her life: An unbearable punishment. By God.
I wonder what the mystical expression, ‘a ray of darkness’, could mean to her, if darkness were not a punishment, not a sin, not a terrible status of hopelessness and powerlessness, but a spiritual window which invites us to let ourselves fully be with our pains, uncertainty, insecurity, fear, in the darkness of ‘unknowing.’ We cannot see, so we refrain from judging, including judging God and judging ourselves.
I wonder - what if, in the darkness, we treated ourselves gently, with more acceptance, and allowed ourselves to be in the ‘clouds’ of unknowing. What if we didn’t try to poke our heads above the clouds to see what we could predict, expect, judge, evaluate from above. Instead of desperately searching for light, any light, we learn the spiritual practice of being and gently becoming what we are called to be: children of God. I wonder in the midst of a place of pain, what we are going to really experience, if we let ourselves just be there?
If the darkness has a flame, how should our faith and our being be refined?
In today’s reading, Isaiah delivers a message of joy: “The light that has dawned will make all who see it radiant.” Here, Isaiah does not say that the dawn’s light is radiant. It says that the light will make all who see it radiant.
Having faith does not keep us from going through the darkness in our life. Darkness can mean hardship and difficulties. Darkness can simply mean that we can’t see. Walking and being, without knowing, without predicting, without seeing, without judging, without attributing blame, is a hard task especially when we are in a hard place. We desire, we long for the light’s dawning, the light’s growing, the light’s glaring and blazing. We would prefer knowing everything, to knowing nothing. Yet, what the light of Epiphany teaches us is that the light we desire, the light we long for is what makes us who see it radiant. Journeying with the light means that, even in the dark, we trust that God is radiant in the deepest part of our beings, so we retain our courage, hope, power, and joy. Through God, WE become radiant. Both the light and the dark refine us through our faith.
I dream that someday, Marg and I sit on the couch in that little downstairs room again, and say to each other, “Have you figured out how darkness can have a ray?” I hope that she has her own answer, as I have one: "Perhaps, the ray of darkness is seeing the light of the Living Christ being born from within.”
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