Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life (2 page)

There is a part of the soul that stirs at night, in the dark and soundless times of day, when our defenses are down and our daylight distractions no longer serve to protect us from ourselves. What we suppress in the light emerges clearly in the dusk. It’s then, in the still of life, when we least expect it, that questions emerge from the damp murkiness of our inner underworld. Questions with ringtones that call the soul to alert but do not come with ready resolutions. Questions about life, not about the trivia of dailiness. The kind of questions to which there is no one answer but which, nevertheless, plague us for attention if we are ever to move through the dimness of life’s twists and turns with confidence.

These questions do not call for the discovery of data; they call for the contemplation of possibility.

It is these kinds of questions that beleaguer the soul
from one end of life to the other. It is these questions that the great spiritual traditions of every age have always set out to face and tame.

But how does this happen and what does it demand of us if we are to brook the inexorable appearance of these confusions, these tormentors of the spirit, and bend them to the best in us?

The truth is that we spend our lives in the centrifuge of paradox. What seems certainly true on the one hand seems just as false on the other. Life is made up of incongruities: Life ends in death; what brings us joy will surely bring us an equal and equivalent amount of sorrow; perfection is a very imperfect concept; fidelities of every ilk promise support but also often end.

How can we account for these things? How can we deal with them? How can we find as much comfort in them as there is confusion? These are the queries that will not go away but which, the spiritual giants of every age knew, need to be faced if we are ever to rise above the agitation of them. There is a point in life when its paradoxes must be not only considered but laid to rest.

The great truth of early monastic spirituality, for instance, lies in the awareness that only when life is lived in the aura of the transcendent, in the discovery of the Spirit present to us in the commonplaces of life, where the paradoxes lie, can we possibly live life to its fullness, plumb life to its depths.

When seekers went out to the wasteland looking for spiritual direction from the Fathers and Mothers of the desert, they did not receive in response to their spiritual questions harsh exercises in self-denial. On the contrary.
They received instruction in self-knowledge. They received the wisdom of those who themselves had fathomed the tumult of life’s paradoxes. They were instructed in the need to confront the tensions of them in their own lives. Not to deny them. Not to try to escape them. Not to ignore them. Not even to judge them. They were required to learn to see in the opposites of life the real richness of life.

Stories abound in the Christian tradition extolling the exploits of great spiritual figures whose fasts were Olympian, their years of solitude monumental, their rigorous disciplines on every level breathtaking. And so?

That kind of spiritual discipline is certainly impressive, but it does not represent the whole story. It is not even the greater part of the stories of any of the great spiritual eras or traditions. Seekers throughout the ages, the great mystics of every century, knew that it is not in physical asceticisms alone, let alone essentially, that the soul grows, expands, centers, and becomes its most radiant self.

In fact, the physical feats of those whose marks of the spiritual life lie in taxing the body and ignoring the world are, at best, more questionable disciplines to the age in which we live now than they are acceptable examples of an inspiring spiritual life. We flee them like the scourge. So what good were they?

If truth were known, that kind of spiritual heroism may well do more to discourage commitment to the spiritual life than to inspire it. So what is the stuff of the universal spiritual quest and path? What can possibly be found from across the ages as spiritual model for the likes of us?

To the average person whose life is exemplary most of all for its ordinariness—to people like you and me, for
instance—it is what goes on inside of us that matters for the healthy life and real spirituality.

Clearly, the spiritual life begins within the heart of a person. And when the storms within recede, the world around us will still and stabilize as well. Or to put it another way, it was greed that broke Wall Street, not the lack of financial algorithms. Whatever it is that we harbor in the soul throughout the nights of our lives is what we will live out during the hours of the day.

This single-minded concentration on the essence and purpose of life, along with a focus on inner quietude and composure, makes for a life lived in white light and deep heat at the very core of the soul. Centering on the spirits within us, rather than being obsessed with the vicissitudes and petty imperfections of life gives the soul its stability, whatever the kinds or degrees of turbulence to be dealt with around it.

It is those elements of spirituality that this book is about, not extreme asceticisms or rejection of the world. Sometimes extolled in early spirituality, they are actually minor themes in the history of spirituality.

Nevertheless, this book has not been written for the sake of recording or repeating the wisdom of the past.

Instead, this book is meant to shine light on the inner confusions of our own age. It is written for all our sakes. For now—for this time and place, where we live our lives at the epicenter of chaos and crises from all directions. We are weary and worn out from its petty problems and daily stress, are in search of the quiet that calms confusion and clarifies insights and firms the path.

It is these paradoxes of our own times that skulk within us, that confuse us, sap our energy, and, in the end, tax our strength for the dailiness of life. They call us to the depth of ourselves. They require us to see Life behind life. Confronting the paradoxes of life around us and in us, contemplating the meaning of them for ourselves, eventually and finally, leads to our giving place to the work of the Spirit in our own lives.

And then will we have answers to it all? Probably not. Johann W. von Goethe wrote once, “Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.” It is thinking through life alone, by ourselves or as communities of seekers with no particular or immediate instance in mind, that may save us from giving ourselves up to the enigmas of life in despair.

For all of us, paradox underlies the question of what it means to be human. These thoughts that rise out of nowhere in us between dark and dawn seem to have no content but will not let us rest. How is it that what is right at some times is not right at all times? What does it take to choose between them? This little book is an excursion into recognizing in the convolutions of this process the stuff of our own life of the spirit.

Psychologists tell us that one of the most difficult conditions a person can be forced to bear is light deprivation. Darkness, in fact, is often used in military captivity or penal institutions to break down an individual’s sense of self. Once a person becomes disoriented, once they lose a sense of where they are, and what it is that lurks in the dark around them, or where the next crevasse or wall or attack may be coming from—once they can no longer feel in control of their physical surroundings—a person loses a sense of self. Every shred of self-confidence shrivels. The giant within them falls and they become whimpering prey of the unknown. The natural instinct to be combative is paralyzed by fear. The spirit of resistance weakens. The prisoner becomes more pliable, more submissive, more willing to take directions.

It disarms a person, this fall into the sinkhole of sensory
deprivation. It can drive them to madness. It is, every military knows, an effective technique.

Nothing does more than darkness to isolate us from the sense of human support and understanding which, whether we’re commonly conscious of it or not, is the human being’s main source of self-definition. Indeed, darkness separates us from reality. It disorients a person both physically and psychologically.

Simple as it may seem, when the lights go out, we simply lose our bearings. The density of the dark makes it impossible for us to fix our positions anymore. We find ourselves alone in the universe, untethered and unprepared. The blackness of lightlessness leaves us no internal compass by which to trace or set our steps. Unlike the blind, few of us ever learn to develop our other senses enough to rely on them for information about the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Interestingly enough, it is those who consider themselves sighted who are most limited without light. And so, in the end, the tenebrous undermines the average person’s self-confidence, affects their vision, leaves them totally vulnerable to the environment and out of touch with the people around them. And that is only its physical effects.

The darkness of the soul is no less spiritually punishing than is the loss of physical light to the psyche. We talk about faith but cannot really tolerate the thought of it. It’s light we want, not shadow, certainty not questions. The aphotic, the place without images, is no less an attack on faith and hope than those periods in life when nighttime brings nothing but unclarity, nothing but fear. Where am I
going? the soul wants to know. When will this be over? the mind wants to know. How can I get out of this sightless place I’m in? the heart demands.

The sense of being stranded in the midst of life, of having no way out of this smothering nothingness, this cul-de-sac of the soul, is enough to drain a person’s very personality until there is little left to recognize. Where did the joy go all of a sudden? Where did the feeling of self-confidence disappear to in the midst of this emptiness? Just yesterday life was clear and vibrant. Today it is endlessly bleak. The darkness is unyielding. Nothing helps; nothing takes it away.

There is no light here, we think. But we think wrong.

There is a light in us that only darkness itself can illuminate. It is the glowing calm that comes over us when we finally surrender to the ultimate truth of creation: that there is a God and we are not it. Whatever we had assumed to be an immutable dimension of the human enterprise is not. In fact, it is gone and there is nothing we can do to bring it back. Then the clarity of it all is startling. Life is not about us; we are about the project of finding Life. At that moment, spiritual vision illuminates all the rest of life. And it is that light that shines in darkness.

Only the experience of our own darkness gives us the light we need to be of help to others whose journey into the dark spots of life is only just beginning. It’s then that our own taste of darkness qualifies us to be an illuminating part of the human expedition. Without that, we are only words, only false witnesses to the truth of what it means to be pressed to the ground and rise again.

Darkness is a mentor of what it means to carry the light we ourselves have brought to blaze into the unknown parts of life so that others may also see and take hope. “Rabbi,” the disciples begged of their dying master, “how can we possibly go on when you are gone?” And the rabbi answered them, “It is like this: Two men went into the forest together but only one carried a light. When they parted there, the one with the light went on ahead while the other floundered in the darkness.” The disciples insisted, “Yes, that is how it is and that is why we are so frightened to be without you.” The old man fixed them with a long, strong stare and said, “Exactly. That is why you must each carry your own light within you.”

The light we gain in darkness is the awareness that, however bleak the place of darkness was for us, we did not die there. We know now that life begins again on the other side of the darkness. Another life. A new life. After the death, the loss, the rejection, the failure, life does go on. Differently, but on. Having been sunk into the cold night of black despair—and having survived it—we rise to new light, calm and clear and confident that what will be, will be enough for us.

Growth is the boundary between the darkness of unknowing and the light of new wisdom, new insight, new vision of who and what we ourselves have become. After darkness we are never the same again. We are only stronger, simpler, surer than ever before that there is nothing in life we cannot survive, because though life is bigger than we are, we are meant to grow to our fullest dimensions in it.

As Og Mandino says of it, “I will love the light for it
shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.”

The stars that come with darkness are the new insights, the new directions, the new awareness of the rest of life that darkness brings. Then, at the end of the struggle with it, the spirit of resistance finally gives way to the spirit of life.

Then we are free to simply allow life to go on around us until the contours of it begin slowly to emerge out of the nothingness that our lives have now become. Then we know that a new day is on the brink, that new life is coming to us, that a new direction is finally coming clear again, that the light within us has come to spark.

The human soul, it appears, is an ageless thing. If we can believe the annals of spiritual seekers across time, whatever bothered it in the third century—anger, desire, jealousy, lust—is clearly still bothering it in the twenty-first. But now it has a twenty-first-century name to suit its style and validate its current claim to legitimacy. We call it the search for “peace of soul” and frame it as some kind of mystical prize.

In this case, the spiritual contest for peace of soul demonstrates itself in the propensity for frustration. It lies embedded in the human psyche, exuding annoyance, publicly prominent and quietly tyrannous at the same time.