Darkness and Light
Darkness and Light
Jessica Martin reflects on themes of darkness and light.
1. Candlemas
Yesterday we celebrated the feast of Candlemas, which is one name for the Feast held at the end of Christmas’s forty days’ season. Sometimes it’s also called ‘The Presentation of Christ in the Temple’, recalling the day Jesus was brought by his parents to be dedicated to the service of God, recounted in the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel.
In Ely Cathedral, Candlemas is celebrated as an evening eucharist. The dark nave flickers with clusters of small flames; around them the shadows seem particularly, smokily thick. The roof space all but vanishes; the altar, by contrast, with its tall, exactly spaced array of lights, blazes gold. All who come are given a candle: these are lit and then blessed from the font at the service’s end. These are blessings to take away into the dark world’s wraths and sorrows.
That strange mixture of shadow and bright flame, danger and hope, suffuses the story of Christ’s presentation. Simeon, the old man awaiting the coming Messiah, will find the fulfilment of his vigil in the sight of the baby. With it he will also find his death. He is not afraid. The death forms part of the fulfilment: ‘Lord’, he prays, ‘Let your servant depart in peace: my eyes have seen your salvation’. He has nothing left to long for: this is a life complete.
The prophecy Simeon speaks has as much pain in it as joy. The child is a sign ‘that will be opposed’, bringing conflict as well as peace. He is a light rising upon the turmoil of the nations. And he – the light of his mother’s eyes – must wound her heart: ‘a sword will pierce your own soul’, the old man tells her.
When the bright face of God blazes into the shadows, they look all the thicker for it. Light your candle of blessing, and take it, with your courage, in your hands.
2. A Window for Grace
‘You are the light of the world’, Jesus told his companions (Matt.5.14). And we echo his words in what we say to newly baptised and confirmed Christians as we give them lighted candles to take out into the world’s darkness: ‘shine as a light in the world, to the glory of the God the Father’.
Light’s not just a thing in itself. Light’s how we see and come to understand other things. So ‘being a light’ is a way of talking about being a vessel, a means through which light shines. ‘You also will light my candle’, sings the psalmist in psalm 18. ‘My God shall make my darkness to be bright’.
So people who are ‘lights’ are there as gifts, for the sake of illuminating what’s around them. That’s a very different and a very generous way of being a self, because you spread out from your own borders as you give your gift to what’s around you. Living for ‘God’s glory’ is as simple and as necessary as light in a dark place.
George Herbert thought about what this meant for ordinary, fragile human beings in his poem ‘The Windows’, written in the 1620s. ‘Lord’, he asked, ‘how can man preach thy eternall Word? He is a brittle, crazie glass’. He was imagining the cracks and weak points of the human soul, the way the slightest tap or knock could shatter us. But then he thinks again, and adds
Yet in thy temple thou does him afford
This glorious and transcendent place,
To be a window for thy grace.
We don’t have to be strong, or heroic, or godlike, to be a vessel for the light. We only have to be willing for God to shine through the weak people that we are.
3. The Promise of the Dawn
‘And God said ‘Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years’ (Gen.1.14).
Hearing that read in church, I found myself thinking about how we experience the passing of time. I noticed just how deeply the time of our human lives is marked by the light/darkness/light cycle of our days - not just going onward in a timeline, but round and round: days, seasons, years.
We long for that first streak of light during dark nights; we long for the signs of spring, the snowdrops and early wild blue crocuses, in winter; we long for the new starts offered by the turning of the year.
In the days and years and seasons we also find signs. Signs of promise, of hope, of the possibilities of change.
‘Once a year all things turn,’ said the preacher Lancelot Andrewes as Lent began in the year 1619: ‘and that once is now…In Heaven, the sun in his equinoctial line, the zodiac and all the constellations in it, do now turn about to their first point. The earth and all her plants after a dead winter…the creatures, the fowls of the air, the swallow and the turtle, and the crane and the stork… make their just return’. And all this, ‘everything now turning’, so that ‘we also might make it our time to turn to God in’.
For even though every bright day is overtaken by the darkening sky, we can always hold onto the resurrection promise of the dawn. ‘My soul waits for the Lord’, sings the psalmist, ‘more than the night watch for the morning; more than the night watch for the morning’.
4. Coming Home
Lent began two days ago, on Ash Wednesday. It’s called that because it’s the day we are reminded of our mortality by receiving, upon our foreheads, a cross inscribed in ash, along with the words ‘Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return’.
It seems like a dark beginning to the season of repentance. Yet for many – including me - this reckoning with my own fleetingness and imperfection comes as a sense of peace. It’s a tiring business to be the godlike hero of my own life; a relief to recognise myself a creature flashing its bright moment across the steady attention of God’s continual Now.
We don’t have to think of repentance as a piece of debilitating emotional labour. On the contrary, repentance is the moment to stop trying. To stop trying to conceal weakness, loss, pain and failure; to give up on those improbable and exhausting narratives of innocence and sovereignty; to loosen our death-grip on the doors behind which our vulnerabilities crouch in the dark. Outside those fiercely held defences lies the day, the glory of God’s being, rising like the dawn to illuminate all shadows.
When people came to Jesus to be healed, they also felt met – known through and through. ‘He told me everything I ever did!’ said one of them, ‘can he be the Messiah?’ (John 4.29). What he knew of her was not all good - but she wasn’t worrying about that. The important thing was that he had recognised her. Repentance allows God’s understanding in: it’s an opening-up, allowing yourself to become visible as you let in the light.
Its coming is a gift. Through the cracks of our being it floods, as bright as crystal, as kind as a running stream in sunlight, as easy as coming home.
