I was 28 when I first became acquainted with darkness.
My life was not immune to heartache, per se, but up until then, I’d not let myself feel the fullness of pain. Sometimes it’s hard to explain this to those who weren’t raised in the Church, but somehow I took the teachings of Jesus (and maybe of a guy named Paul), shook them up, and ended up with a belief that being a good Christian meant keeping on the sunny side, always on the sunny side.1
Which is to say that if I was not on the sunny side, then I wasn’t on the side of Christ.
Combine this with a genuine bent towards positivity2 and you’re left with a rather lethal combination: It becomes rather impossible to experience sadness and pain. Not only do you not think you’re supposed to feel sad, but you think there will be genuine repercussions if you let yourself feel sadness in the first place.
So, you do everything you can to prevent yourself from feeling sad. You hold back the tears, and as I wrote about in a previous Substack post, you prevent yourself from feeling this emotion — sometimes, unbelievably, for up to six or seven years at a time.
Yes, this means I didn’t let myself cry for a period of almost seven years.
And then, I did.
Then, it hit. And when this sadness, this Great, Unavoidable Sadness finally proved itself unavoidable, it hit with a force all its own.
Nearly twenty years ago, I left my job in teaching for a job in full-time ministry. That job was a bright and shiny bauble of a position until it wasn’t — until the realization that I was terribly lonely, that the job wasn’t actually a great fit for me, and that full-time ministry work wasn’t going to solve all my problems finally hit me.
And like a dam, I broke. Everything that had been pent up inside of me, mind you for upwards of seven years at that point, flowed out of me like the damnedest3 dam you’ve ever seen.
All water barriers aside, I became acquainted with darkness. Pain and sadness began to visit me a little more regularly (mostly with the help of therapists who told me I should watch Beaches and learn how to cry). Friends helped, as did the words of St. John of the Cross.4
Some of us, I suppose, are better at becoming acquainted with darkness than others. But all of us, at some point, are invited to get to know darkness — which is to say pain, which is also to say sadness.
I thought about this when I sat with a story about a man called John the Baptist this last week. As one who was sent to “testify to the light”5 I wondered how to testify to light when darkness feels rather, well, dark.
As it goes, acquainting ourselves with darkness seemed like our invitation on Sunday morning. Once again, it hit me like a ton of bricks6 that morning too. So, it makes me wonder: is it the same for you?
Here’s a small part of the sermon7:
—
Isn’t it interesting that sometimes, in order to testify to the light, we first have to become acquainted with darkness?
Darkness is not something we humans are good at. As children, many of us were scared of the dark – scared of the things we couldn’t see and didn’t therefore know, scared of what might happen when light wasn’t present. Some of us still are. Of course, it’s not all that different for grownups either: whether metaphorical or literal, darkness isn’t always something we want to embrace. Darkness isn’t something we want to cozy up to and get to know on a personal basis.
When hard things happen, which is to say, when darkness creeps into our lives, it’s easy to look for solutions to the darkness. Flip on the light switch! Look for cracks of light! Because if we can make the darkness go away, just a teeny, tiny little bit, then we won’t have to feel the pain that comes with becoming acquainted with the dark.
As a Seven on the Enneagram, darkness, or more plainly stated, pain, isn’t something I want to experience. When hard things happen, the last thing I want is to feel how much that hard thing, that bit of sadness, that piece of darkness hurts me.
But sometimes darkness is inevitable. Darkness shows up in unexpected phone calls or in a loved one’s fall; it pays us a visit, often when we are most unaware, with doctor’s diagnoses and job loss, when violence and civil unrest and hardship overwhelm. It covers us, like a blanket, when wars break out halfway around the world and none remain unaffected. What are we to do with darkness, then, when none of the usual tricks seem to, well, do the trick?
Maybe that’s when we’re invited to get to know darkness.
Over the last several years, some faith communities have begun to hold Blue Christmas and Longest Night services. These services are often held on the longest night of the year, on or around winter solstice, which is actually this coming Thursday, December 21st. “Such observances, which acknowledge sadness, provide much-needed respite,”
says.8 “What a relief to make collective room for grief, if just for an hour or so, when it seems as if, everywhere else, there’s mandatory merriment and inflicted cheer.” Here, folks gather together around an emotion that is not always recognized or readily accepted, let alone cheered on or encouraged to embody around the holiday season.A tradition that started within Canadian hospices in the 1980s, as Ruth Graham states, “the idea of Blue Christmas is to acknowledge the darkness, and let it be dark. That is a quietly revolutionary act in an optimism-obsessed culture that would pressure even the Little Match Girl to look on the bright side.”9
Perhaps like you, I’m not always good at darkness, but I wonder if we’re invited in to darkness now so we can testify to the light then.
—
In this with you,
c.
Hey guys, there’s a dark and a troubled side of life, but you really should keep on the sunny side.
Some people call this being a Seven on the Enneagram. I call it just being me (which means I am actually a Seven on the Enneagram, as it turns out).
I really wanted to say “damiest dam” you ever saw here, but Webster’s told me I should stick with damnedest. I suppose that works too.
Check out the poem, “The Dark Night of the Soul,” and also, the book.
Mark 1:1-8
Look, a new analogy!
Given at St. Paul’s San Rafael. Love that place and those people.
I love that Jeff wrote about Longest Night; it had been on my list of things to write about, but when he covered it, there was no longer a need. He spelled it out beautifully. Check it out.
Jeff quotes Ruth in his post (above).
Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) have every right to say what they like about Israel and the genocide of Palestinians as elected members of the US House of Representatives; they never took an oath to serve Israel . . .
I voted for Ron Desantis (R-FL) to be governor of Florida, not ambassador to Israel.
The recently ousted Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who took at least a dozen votes to get elected speaker, traveled to Israel immediately upon his election, declaring to the Israeli Knesset that the USA is steadfastly committed to supporting Ukraine in their war against Russia . . .
Was he running for speaker of the Israeli Knesset too?
Following his ouster . . . McCarthy (R-CA) traveled abroad again, this time to England, and expressed his open contempt for the white Republicans who make up the majority of the GOP and praised Democrats for their diversity during a debate at Oxford in the wake of his ouster as House Speaker . . .
Is he now running for the Prime Minister of the U.K.?
Nevertheless, he is free to go on media tours bashing white people and lobbying for Israel, because he has now resigned from the US House of Representatives . . . I can only conclude that the collective RINO butthurt over former Speaker McCarthy is all about the Israelis who have hijacked the American deep state war machine.
It has become so painfully obvious, especially where you have someone like Nikki Haley wagging her finger and shouting down Vivek Ramaswamy in a presidential debate on live national television when the questions of this Ukrainian war against Russia and any mention of Israel are concerned, that the United States government has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the American Israeli Political Action Committee.
https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/satanism-is-a-jewish-cult
In what the late Saddam Hussein once dubbed “the great Satan,” roughly two-thirds of the United States enlisted military corps is white . . . The fat, bulbous, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin once confirmed in a 93-2 vote of the U.S. Senate, immediately embarked on a whirlwind media tour of duty, telling the pseudo-secular sycophants in the state-controlled tabloid press and state-controlled television talk show circuit about how the U.S. Army is full of bad racist white men.
Senior Defense Department leaders celebrating yet another Pride Month at the Pentagon sounding the alarm about the rising number of state laws they say target the LGBTQ+ community, warned the trend is hurting the feelings of the armed forces . . . “LGBTQ plus and other diverse communities are under attack, just because they are different. Hate for hate’s sake,” said Gil Cisneros, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for personnel and readiness, who also serves as DoD’s chief diversity and inclusion officer.
And now the U.S. Army is doing ads begging for more young white males?
What happened?
Even with a full-on declaration of war from Congress, and even if Gavin Newsome could be cheated into the Oval Office by ZOG somehow, while Globohomo diversity brigades go door-to-door looking to impress American children into military service, they will be met with armed, well-trained opposition, the invasion at the Southern border is going full tilt, and the drugs are flowing in like never before . . .
With the borders of Europe and the USA wide open, civil warfare within the USA, Britain, and most of Europe is a certainty if foreign wars are initiated. Nobody is going to fight a war for Biden, he is dumber than Bush . . . Nobody is going to fight a war for that kikesucking Zionist ass-whore Nikki Haley, and I mean nobody.
Get ready for it . . . the fat old devil worshipping fags on Capitol Hill, on Wall Street, in Whitehall, and in Brussels are in no shape to fight a war themselves, and most Americans are armed to the teeth with their own guns . . . NATO hates heterosexual white men . . . they said so themselves . . .
https://cwspangle.substack.com/i/138320669/nato-an-anti-white-and-anti-family-institution