Father Richard Rohr reflects on spiritual transformation and the metaphor of moving from darkness to light:
Spiritual transformation is often thought of as movement from darkness to light. In one sense that’s true, while in another sense, it’s totally false. We forget that darkness is always present alongside the light. We know the light most fully in contrast with its opposite—the dark. Pure light blinds; shadows are required for our seeing. There is something that can only be known by going through “the night sea journey” into the belly of the whale, from which we are spit up on an utterly new shore. Western civilization as a whole has failed to learn how to honor the wisdom of darkness. Rather than teaching a path of descent, Western Christianity preached a system of winners and losers, a “prosperity gospel.” Few Christians have been taught to hold the paschal mystery of both death and resurrection.
In many ways, the struggle with darkness has been the church’s constant dilemma. It wants to exist in perfect light, where God alone lives (see James 1:17). It does not like the shadowland of our human reality. It seems that all of us are trying to find ways to avoid the mystery of human life—that we are all a mixture of darkness and light—instead of learning how to carry it patiently through to resurrection, as Jesus did.
There are no perfect structures and no perfect people. There is only the struggle to be whole. It is Christ’s passion (patior, the “suffering of reality”) that will save the world. Jesus says, “Your patient endurance will win you your lives” (Luke 21:19). He shows us the way of redemptive suffering instead of redemptive violence. Patience comes from our attempts to hold together an always-mixed reality. Perfectionism only makes us resentful and judgmental. Grateful people emerge in a world rightly defined, where even darkness is no surprise but an opportunity.
Poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer explores the dance between darkness and light in her poem Before Winter Solstice, I Remember:
This, too, is what we are born for,
this waking in darkness, unable
to see, but still able to hear the shush
of wind in bare branches, able to feel
the charge of our heartbeat, the swell
of our belly as it fills with borrowed air.
I have spent my life learning to love
these shapeless hours before the light
finds us, these shadowsome nights when
my whole being seems to stretch beyond
the bed, beyond the room, beyond the home,
beyond the valley, beyond even the globe,
as if I rhyme with the dark all around us,
the dark that holds us, the dark that surrounds
this whole swirling spiral of galaxy.
Sometimes, I feel how that infinite darkness
calls to the darkness inside me as if to say,
remember, remember where you come from,
remember what you are. And the darkness
inside me sings back. [2]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder (Franciscan Media, 2020), 183–185.
[2] Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, “Before Winter Solstice, I Remember,” A Hundred Falling Veils (blog), December 17, 2024. Used with permission. For more about the poet, see WordWoman.com.
Image credit and inspiration: Niko Tsviliov, untitled (detail), 2023, photo, Ukraine, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Just as the moon dances with shadow and light, remaining herself throughout, we also dance with shadow and light, reflecting her wisdom rhythms.
Story from Our Community:
When I was in my 20s, I struggled with suicidal depression. Because of counseling and medication, I decided to continue my life. However, there was still an emptiness deep inside me. I felt like I was not quite good enough and lived in constant fear of being belittled by others. Now in my 60s, I have recently begun to practice centering prayer and lectio divina. For the first time in my life, I genuinely feel and deeply believe that I am a beloved child of God. I have truly been born again!
—Mary H.
