The Bright Shining Dark

I watched the young woman trudge through the forest occasionally stopping to look at the camera and tell us things. She was strong, uncompromising and her eyes were small, black and piercing. “Hope?” she said “Hope is for the privileged. What matters is action.” She then went on to describe what kind of action is needed - militant, revolutionary and visionary. She had markings on her face telling the story of her indigenous roots and she wore heavy boots. Her hair was loose and she was stopping for no-one. We who watched and listened online to her had to keep up. She was ready for war. I felt like I had entered another reality and it was an ominous one.

Over the past weeks I’ve heard people say that hope is for the privileged, kindness is overrated and that love is a vague word that is open to manipulation, so better not to use it. I’ve also read articles that tell us parts of the world are going through “winter” or a troubled season. The news cycle is determined to keep our tired eyes glued to its updates about possible threats of war, new pandemics emerging, everyday sickening acts of violence and the opposite of “moral beauty”. Even though this certainly describes our reality today, I also feel we are creating it. What worries me most today is not the darkness - though it does worry me - but that we are giving voice to and speaking words coming from our anxiety, fear and collective dystopian imagination. To some extent it’s inevitable that this will create our reality - and it is at the present moment, dark.

When I attempt to speak words of courage, hope or kindness in this climate I feel the words wobble on my lips about to articulate, but then they fall down onto the ground; they don’t make it to vocalisation. I feel I am being sentimental or naive or privileged - as the uncompromising woman in the forest preparing for war told me. I feel as though my soft words belong to another time before this darkness came upon us and things were, well, more luminous.

But what if our hope is in the darkness of our times? What if we saw the bright shining dark? What if there was the luminous in the dark? In my book Everyday Spirituality coming in 2027, I’m writing a chapter on finding transcendence and spiritually in the dark. This is not new. Mystics have spoken and written about finding the Divine in the dark for centuries. The apophatic tradition in the Christian faith has made a clear impact - though marginalised by more conservative or institutional expressions of the faith. It’s interesting that in these dark times many conservative Christians are writing about this way of thinking about darkness (See James K.A Smith’s new book Make your home in this Luminous dark for instance, about to be published) In times of darkness we can shrink our world further by enforcing certainty or we can embrace the unknowing - Smith has chosen to do the latter. And that’s a curious move for many people of faith today.

Seeing the dark as a context for the divine is not about positive thinking. It’s also not about holding your breath through dark times waiting for the light to come. It’s not to romanticise dark times or to wallow in despair. It is about seeing the dark as a necessary expression of the luminous - the bright shining dark. One of my favourite books on this is The Insurmountable Darkness of Love by Douglas E. Christie. He writes;

The experience of the night can be terrifying, bewildering, less a place to rest and heal than a dispiriting struggle with pain and absence. Still, there is also something about the enveloping darkness, its silence and stillness and depth, its inscrutability and ineffability, that comforts and soothes, that releases us from our compulsive need to account for everything, explain everything. What Antoine de Saint-Exupery calls: ‘Night, the beloved night, when words fade and things come alive.’

Darkness can be a comfort. And silence can soothe.

There is also such a thing as “light pollution”. Our skies are too bright with artificial light impacting nature, disrupting our sleep patterns and keeping our minds perpetually “on” when they should be able to rest. Light isn’t all good all the time. We need the dark. It’s through a silky black night sky that we can more clearly see the constellation of glimmering stars in our orbit.

What would it look like to see at least some of the darkness of our world today through the lens of the bright shining dark? I have no answers but I wonder if this may be a way we can wander about in this dark season while still also grasping for words of hope, kindness and love.

Or maybe we don’t use words at all and we sit in silence - finally realising our limitations as human beings, resting simply in what is.

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Explorer. Writer. Leaf blower hater. Flâneuse. Neighbourhood enthusiast. Spirituality and faith. Tea snob. Orophile. Author of Urban Spirituality

'Everyday Spirituality' will be published late 2027. It explores the luminous, transcendence and everyday spirituality for a weary world. It is written for spiritual seekers and sceptics alike. Find Karina here