Within most Christian imagery, darkness is usually used in negative ways.

Darkness can mean ignorance, fearfulness, viciousness. It can mean a condition of tragically unnecessary suffering. It can mean the delusion and sin-sickness that leads to that suffering. It can mean denying or violently negating what is true and good and beautiful and holy. It can mean a willful rejection of God in favor of the illusion of one’s own inflated ego.

This is darkness as absence: like the darkness of a pit, which is dark because there is in fact nothing there.

Now, problems have come when this leads to a simplistic formula of bad = dark, therefore everything dark is bad. This is terrible logic and has been used to justify terrible things like racism.

But there have been some great teachers throughout Christian history who have explored a different side of darkness. Especially in the more, you could say, mystical writings about the experience of prayer, we find folks honoring the kind of darkness that a seed finds in the darkness of the soil, or gestating life finds in the darkness of the womb.

This is a darkness not of absence, but of overwhelming presence.

What is it like to find oneself to be in the inside of something much, much greater than oneself? What is it like to become fully immersed into a great and tremendous Mystery, becoming engulfed in the fathomless oceanic depths of the Sacred Source of Being itself?

One prayer manual from an anonymous 14th century monk calls this “The Cloud of Unknowing.”

“Learn to be at home in this darkness” this teacher says. Let “the arrow of your love”, they say, draw you deeper into this cloud of unknowing.

Un-knowing: For any of our human ideas or images or sense perceptions or sense of self and other simply dissolve in the embrace of even a taste of the transcendent Reality of the “Divine,” “God” (for lack of a better word). The Sacred Presence of Holy Transcendence therefore can appear as darkness.

Yet, in fact even the image of “darkness” doesn’t do this justice.

Gregory of Nyssa, who was a 4th century theologian, in what’s now Turkey, wrote a mystical discourse on Moses’ encounters with “ha shem” in the thick clouds on holy mountains. For St. Gregory this revelation is a journey from light to darkness, and then to something deeper than darkness: “Luminous Darkness” he called it.

Language strains and breaks apart when one tries to convey what is reveled and what is hidden in a blessed encounter with the Holy Mystery Beyond Name.

How can we respond but with awe and gratitude, humility and love? So, we honor the darkness.

Delivered at an interfaith winter solstice celebration, on December 21, 2024, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg. This is a companion piece to “Rejoicing in the Light.”

Image: “Untitled (Black on Grey),” by Mark Rothko, 1970. Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.