Chapter 7: When Shadows Come, Darkness Comes Early (continued)

At the end of Chapter 7, Leighton Ford tells the story of Jerry Sittser, who “lost his mother, his wife, and their youngest daughter” in one tragic moment. In some sort of a “waking dream” Jerry found himself completely unable to find any kind of solace; his was a great inability to chase and grasp any light of a sinking western sun. After he “felt a vast darkness closing in,” Ford tells us that Jerry’s sister, Diane, “told him that the quickest way to reach the sun was “not to go west” into the diminishing sunset, “but instead to head east, to move fully ‘into the darkness until one comes to a sunrise’.” That “counterintuitive insight” helped Jerry find “a road to recovery.” He allowed himself to “walk into the darkness” and so “be transformed” by his suffering “rather than to think that somehow [he] could avoid it” (162).

All of us in our class who are reading The Attentive Life have some inkling, some knowledge of what it means to “walk into the darkness.” If ever you should get to know my wife June and me well, you will come to know that both of us have gone through, like you, a lot of darkness. In addition you will find out that twice a day June and I sing three or four (sometimes more) psalms, making our way through the Book of Psalms once a month. So it is that on the morning of the sixteenth of each month, we turn to Psalm 88 and quietly chant it to a very simple tune or psalm tone. The end of Psalm 88 ends with these words: “and darkness is my only companion.” In the short silence that follows our psalm singing, June and I are reminded on each month’s sixteenth day that we’ve not been alone whenever we've entered darkness. Long before us, some Hebrew poet (maybe it was David) has previously gone eastward at sunset. Psalm 88 is a very dark poem, full of foreboding, weighed down with a sense of loneliness and despair. And yet June and I sing it. I chant it quietly because like the “counterintuitive insight” of Jerry’s sister, we need the reminder that it’s genuinely all right to walk into the eastward darkness at day's end because that’s where our Lord Jesus has been. He too has gone into the Dark, and in the Dark my Lord will be with June and me.

The Dark, of course, can take many shapes. Sometimes death, sometimes divorce, sometimes addiction, sometimes guilt, and sometimes a profound personal dissatisfaction with the way one’s life is going. In one form or another, I, perhaps along with you, have experienced nearly all of these Darknesses. Now that I’m in my seventies—strange as it may seem—it’s at times the realization that my life has been unsatisfactory to me (and to God) that presents itself as a Darkness into which I must enter. I have a postcard I use as a bookmark in my prayerbook that says “Jesus joins us in our human difficulties at the point which we dislike ourselves the most.” That place "where I dislike myself the most" is the Dark into which I take one step at a time as Jesus Christ carries a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. As I enter that darkness I'm discovering that my Lord is transforming me into his likeness. It's all very slow and not very dramatic, but it's happening. It's happening as Paul promised in his second letter to the Corinthians when he says, "So we're not giving up. How could we! Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace."

I don't know what your darkness is, but like Jerry, like the Psalmist, and like Christ, you may go eastward at sunset and be transformed by whatever suffering in darkness you experience because God is with you on the way.