Waiting in the Dark
Learning to see after artificial lights fade | The Word in the Wild, Epiphany 5, Year B
Last February, around this time, my family drove long miles through the deserts of Texas—tumbleweeds rolling across the pavement and roadrunners darting from creosote bushes. Moving south, then west, then south again, we took a left up a winding road, following the ridge of an ancient volcano. The landscape changed as we climbed, cacti to pines and scrubby oaks, then aspen and firs along the mountains above. We were in the Chisos basin of Big Bend National Park where we would camp for a week.
That first night, it was cloudy, and when dark fell it was almost like turning off a flashlight in a cave. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. But on the following nights, clearer skies opened to a dazzling array of stars, the Milky Way running like a bright ribbon across the sky. This is one of the darkest skies in North America, which means, ironically, that is one of the brightest with starlight.
It had been a long while since I had seen a night like that, but looking up at the vast expanse I was reminded how comforting it can be to lay beneath the stars. There is a feeling of being both small and grand, each of us a flash in the cosmic scene and yet included within it, wrapped in the great swirling dance that made it all.
B.J. Miller is a palliative care doctor who has attended to over a thousand patients in their final hours. A triple amputee and burn victim, he knows in his body the realities of suffering and the fleeting nature of life. One of the exercises he uses to cope with that reality is to spend time looking up at the stars. For him, there is something comforting in watching the night sky and realizing that some of the stars we see have already collapsed into blackholes by the time their light reaches us. Seeing such a reality can help put our lives in perspective; it’s a truth that can bring peace to whatever momentary pain we are feeling.
This comfort is something the ancients understood. Job, perhaps the oldest book in our scriptures, shows its hero finding solace not in the words of his friends trying to provide reasons for his pain, but instead in the whirlwind from which God reminds him that human life is not at the center of divine concern. God calls Job to look away from himself and toward the vast wilds that serve no human ends or purpose. This same truth is repeated in Ps. 147 where God’s ability to count the stars and name them is a reminder of the limits of human life and power. And in Isaiah 40, in a message to the people returning from exile, we are given a glimpse of the divine perspective: “It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers” (Isaiah 40:22).
Such a reminder of our smallness, or even perhaps our insignificance, might not seem like palliative at all. And yet that is exactly what it is. In these reminders of our dependence and fragility, we are given the best news possible: we are not God. All of our institutions and powers, our politics and problems are nothing in the grand expanse of God’s life and love. That God brings “princes to naught” and “makes the rulers of the earth as nothing” (Isaiah 40:23) is very good news in a world that seems ever more unsettled.
In our world, however, it can be hard to realize this ancient truth. We go out at night and see only a scattering of stars if we are lucky. Our lives are dominated by human institutions, human powers and technologies. We have placed our artificial lights everywhere, blazing into the night so that no stars can come through. And it is easy in such a world to begin to feel the burden of our power, to begin to think that the future is ours to make and control.
Why have we blocked out the stars? Why do we leave our lights burning—disrupting the rhythms of our bodes and the cycles of creation? There are two answers: our ambitions and our anxieties. The first follows the ancient pattern, reflected in the stories of Eden and Babel: we want to be as gods. We long to be more than we are, to do more. Rather than the chance to participate in the divine life, we want to have such a life on our own. Blazing lights in the night help us transcend our limits and be more than our creatureliness demands. We no longer have to stop when the sun goes down; we just flip a switch and we can keep on as long as our bodies hold up. And when they fail, we can force the bodies of others to keep going, exploiting our world and other persons in a pattern of machine life.
The second reason is our fear. It is in the dark that we begin to feel our frightening fragility, that for all our attempts, we are not gods. We realize that we cannot protect ourselves from all of the forces that might harm us and we answer that fear not by facing it, but by escaping. We light our streets and entry ways, we have night lights in the halls. And that light gives us comfort, at least for a while, until we realize that it casts shadows and we cannot escape the dark.
Since we cannot escape the dark, and all our artificial lights will fail to bring us fullness or safety, what are we to do? On another camping trip, several years ago, we pitched our tent at a state park in Connecticut. There was a trail from the campsite to the beach, the Atlantic’s roar beckoning.
We arrived late, the daylight waning, with just enough time to setup camp and cook our dinner. By the time we could walk to the beach, it was dark, so we put on our headlamps and started down the trail through the forest. When we had entered the woods, Emily suggested we turn off our lights. We both pressed the buttons on our foreheads and waited in the calm silence of the woods. In the distance the ocean waves and wind drowned out any machine noises and slowly, clearly, the path began to appear as our eyes adjusted to the night. We walked down to the beach and stood before the starlit ocean, feeling a deep blanket of calm in the vastness of the world. That night walk in the dark remains a reminder to me of what can happen if we wait and trust our bodies with what is offered us in the given light of night.
Isaiah, seeking to show where real energy and life can be had, speaks that lesson in one of the most common calls of scripture: “wait for the Lord.” It is this waiting that makes walking in the dark possible. Our eyes have to have time to adjust, our ears need to tune in. We have to wait until we can trust our steps along the path.
Jesus knew this need for waiting. In the midst of his rising fame and a chance to do the work of healing in the world he took time to wait in a dark and wild place, away from the fires of the town and the safety of the city. It was into the dark that he went to pray, that most fundamental waiting before God. In prayer he oriented himself, remember and accepting his dependence on his Father. In the dark he could look into the starry night and feel the comfort of the Love that made it all; the love of which his own life was an expression. In that light he knew that he could walk through whatever darkness might come, even the darkness of fear and death.
Our world is filled with anxiety and fear, ambition and a longing for control. Both this ambition and anxiety are twins born from the attempt to be more than creatures, small gods blazing our lights into the night until the stars are dim. But such lights won’t answer our deepest desires; they will not lead us into the peaceful wholeness of being fully human. To move into that comfort and completeness, we must learn to walk in the dark, waiting for our eyes to adjust. In that waiting, looking up at the bright and vast expanse of night, we will find the comfort of our smallness, the freedom of dependence upon the one who is true light and love. Laying back upon the ground, looking up, remembering the one who calls all these stars by name, we will find awe and in it healing from all our ambitions and anxieties. “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth” (Isaiah 40:28a).