Longest Nights

I have always been a little bit afraid of the dark.

As a child, I dreaded bedtime because I had trouble falling asleep, and I knew I’d spend time lying awake in the dark, imagining all sorts of monsters emerging from my closet. It’s a tired children’s book cliché, perhaps, but it’s ubiquitous for a reason: we grow up afraid of the shadows under the bed, and so we learn to leave the hall light on until morning comes back around.

Light and darkness have long been fundamental metaphors for human existence. When you think about it, it’s not surprising. Indoors or outdoors, young or old, from the equator to the Arctic Circle, our rhythms of life are shaped by day and night. The advent of electricity gave us a bit more flexibility over our waking hours, to be sure—we can work (or write blog posts) through the night. We can set alarms on our phone to catch a 5 a.m. plane before the sun comes up. But by and large, the rising and setting of the sun still shapes our collective lives, a familiar rhythm in a world full of unknowns.

Perhaps this is why light and darkness have become a sort of shorthand for good and evil. Knights arrive in shining armor, and fairy godmothers appear in a poof of sparkling light. The stroke of midnight turns carriages back into pumpkins. Black cats are symbols of bad luck. It’s no coincidence that Galinda in Wicked has bouncy blonde hair, while Elphaba wears a crooked, black witch’s hat—even as Wicked plays with good and evil, it recognizes the tropes it’s rewriting.

We see this reflected in Scripture, too. Light often represents what is good and right, while darkness represents evil and sin. Jesus is the light of the world. We are called to let our light shine before others. God has rescued us from the dominion of darkness. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.

For many years, I found a lot of comfort in a simplistic version of this metaphor. After all, I have always been afraid of the dark. The promise of God’s deliverance, of healing, of a path back to an easier life without any monsters in the closet is something I couldn’t pass up. But I think this can veer dangerously close to a kind of prosperity gospel that Kate Bowler identifies in No Cure for Being Human: the promise that our lives will work out exactly as we want them to as long as we’re living in God’s will.

In my mid-twenties, I began to have some chronic health issues. I spent several months mostly house-bound as I visited specialists and searched for answers. Since then, my health issues have eased up but have not disappeared. I have some good months and some bad ones, with flares now primarily marked by debilitating fatigue. 

In my own experience with chronic illness, I’ve had to confront the ways many forms of Christianity are uncomfortable with problems that don’t resolve, illness that might not go away, pain that lingers and must be lived with. We like church growth metrics and achievable SMART goals, tidy testimonies that can be written about in the weekly newsletter or answered prayers to share from the pulpit.

When someone is experiencing acute grief or the onset of an illness, we rally around them, but grief and illness often linger long after the freezer meals are gone and the cards are read. Christianity can turn us into fixers, in search of the next miracle, the next success story, or the next worthy cause, because if we linger in the pain and it doesn’t disappear, what does that say about God? If day is good and night is bad, what happens to those of us who live in perpetual twilight?

Tomorrow evening is the longest night of the year, the winter solstice. I’d never attended a church that marks this day, amid the flurry of Advent and Christmastide, until I moved here to Virginia. My church here, though, holds a Longest Night service each year. It’s short, right at dusk, and it makes space for those who’ve experienced loss or are carrying grief this time of year.

A Longest Night service might seem at first to play into the light-darkness binary I’ve come to resist. But to me, there is a difference between trying to flee the darkness and sitting with it, recognizing how it is shaping us. Making space for our grief and pain on the longest night of the year re-grounds the metaphors of light and darkness in the natural cycles of light and dark.

And I find it comforting that, in nature, there isn’t inherent moral value attached to day and night. The sun provides the light needed for plants to grow, but the night is a time for nocturnal animals to be active. Shadows even in the daytime provide a refuge from the heat; stars light our way at night. Light is not our only hope; darkness is not our only enemy.

I am still a bit afraid of the dark. But I am learning to make peace with the night, to know that keenly feeling loss makes us human, that keeping vigil together in grief and fatigue and pain is one of the greatest gifts we can offer to each other. Some might say that hope in the darkness is a flickering candle—the hope we offer to one another, the hope of a baby born in the darkness of a stable. Some days I might say that too. 

But other days I’d say that hope is sitting to rest in the cool shade of a tree, finding refuge from the insistent glare of the sun overhead as the world hums on around me. Or standing in the twilight and watching darkness begin to blanket the Blue Ridge mountains.

For me, on most days now, hope is simply knowing that as grief and pain and sorrow linger—in the darkness and in the light—we are not alone.