New Life Begins in the Dark ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
December 14, 2025
There are many wonderful aspects of living on Cape Ann: the beauty and wonder of the ocean, the variety of places to explore on foot, with plenty of woods and fascinating rock formations, but as much as I love all we are offered here, to me there is nothing better than discovering the night sky. It’s dark up here at night! And so much of the sky is visible to us here, with few tall buildings, so we can easily see the amazing colors of the aurora borealis, and how brilliant the stars are on their black velvet background, and we are given the chance to see the moon rise over the ocean. For the last three months we have experienced three supermoons in a row – so-called when the full moon is at perigee, or the closest point in its orbit to the Earth. The moon appears extra large and bright, and if you’re like me you’ll try to get to a beach to watch it rise. It’s thrilling to watch that first thin shimmering line of light appear on the horizon, and then minute by minute the moon rises, until it’s fully visible and casting a sparkling gold path across the water.
So often, in our culture, we find it hard to welcome the night – instead, in the fall we dread its early arrival. Think back to how we (at least I) feel on that last Sunday in October when we know it’s going to be dark by late afternoon. This time of year, with its very short days, can be challenging for many of us. I find that I feel pressured in the afternoons, driven by a sense of the day being over practically as soon as I’m finished lunch. It’s hard to enjoy that time of day, or this time of year. But I find that once night falls, I can be captured by the beauty, by the serenity: the mystery of the moon waxing and waning, appearing high or low in the sky, and the stars shining through the black tree branches framed by my bedroom window.
We humans are very much conditioned to prefer the light. And surely, we, like all living things, need light and warmth to survive. Plants will not grow without sunshine. Our mental health can be affected by the lack of sunlight this time of year. If there are too many days of clouds and rain, we long to see the sun again. We need it.
At the same time, we also depend upon darkness for survival. Seeds lie dormant in the earth, waiting for the right time to sprout in darkness. Mammals grow in the silence and dark protection of the womb. Studies are showing that our sleep is disrupted by too much light, and it is during sleep that we produce most growth hormones, and when we dream and heal our bodies. We need sleep, and darkness offers the best conditions for us to rest. New life begins in the dark: in the earth, in the womb, in the egg.
Dark and light, together, both essential for life. Our days unfold with the backdrop of the light and the dark flowing from one into the other, the sun and the moon rising and setting, replacing each other as we go through our lives, complementing each other, together creating wholeness: whole days, whole lives.
In religious terms, we too often think of light and dark not as complements, but instead as total opposites, and think of one as good and the other, bad. Light, of course, is named as good, or holy, and the dark is bad, or evil. The creation story in the Hebrew Bible begins: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep…”
Being afraid of the dark is a very common theme – we lie awake listening for things that go bump in the night, as children we worry about monsters under the bed or in the closet. Author and Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor notes that parents often don’t try to teach their children to embrace the darkness, to see it as friendly and peaceful and enveloping. Instead, we are much more likely to check the closets and look under the beds for monsters, and then supply night lights and create brighter light instead of encouraging children to learn to welcome the dark. (Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark, p. 36.)
And of course the creation story goes on to say, “Then God said, ‘let there be light; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.”
Here, on the first night of Hanukkah, as we approach the solstice, and Christmas, we await the return of the light. We are told through ancient stories that the oil that should have lasted one day lasted for eight. The Light of the World is coming to live among us. Goodness is returning. Longer days are returning. The balance will shift back to day being longer than night. We anticipate this, start to relax, feeling that life will be easier. We feel more hopeful. Somehow it feels more natural, easier to find hope when it is light out.
Barbara Brown Taylor refers to this preference as solar spirituality. It is pervasive in our churches, this practice of equating God with light, of goodness with light. As Taylor puts it, “…it focuses on staying in the light of God around the clock, both absorbing and reflecting the sunny side of faith. You can usually recognize a full solar church by its emphasis on the benefits of faith, which include a sure sense of God’s presence, certainty of belief, divine guidance in all things, and reliable answers to prayer.” (Ibid., p.7)
Taylor points out that this is all well and good until we reach a difficult patch in our lives, when we struggle to maintain a hopeful attitude, struggle to believe in the goodness and presence of God. Solar spirituality might not have much to offer people in those times of their lives. In a solar church, people who are struggling might end up being told that the problem is that they don’t have enough faith.
In contrast to a solar spirituality, Brown Taylor proposes we practice a lunar spirituality; a spirituality more in keeping with the dark, and with the natural rhythms of the moon, of nature and of life. As she describes it, “…a spirituality in which the divine light available to (us) waxes and wanes with the season. When I go out on my porch at night the moon never looks the same way twice. Some nights it is as round and bright as a headlight; other nights it is thinner than the sickle hanging in my garage. Some nights it is high in the sky and other nights low over the mountains. Some nights it is altogether gone, leaving a vast web of stars that are brighter in its absence. All in all, the moon is a truer mirror for my soul than the sun that looks the same way every day.” (Ibid, p. 9.)
In our reading earlier we learned of the Coalsack Nebula, a prominent dark nebula, a type of dust cloud so dense that it obscures the light from objects behind it. As the story’s author, Robert Walsh, put it, the nebula ‘reverses our usual focus on the sunlight…and invites us to allow the light to be the background.”
What happens when we allow the light to be in the background? When we embrace the darkness, see it as a natural part of life, not something to be feared, but rather a different perspective, a different way of looking at life? When we do that, when we accept the presence of darkness, we can learn to hope in a different way. We can look for hope in different places, find hope in a dark night, in a hard time or hard place.
It is harder to search for hope in the dark. But it can form a spiritual practice; a life centered more around the softer, ever-changing light of the moon rather than the brightness and constancy of the sun.
Like finding the image of a llama in the Coalsack Nebula, finding a spirituality that is oriented to the night, to the moon and its phases, enables us to focus on what we cannot easily see. It leaves space for mystery, for wonder, for discerning, for trying to see our way forward in times of little light. It can teach us how to search for hope when we can’t see the future well.
For centuries, theologians have been debating about the best way to describe the mystery that is God. Many use what is called the via positiva, the positive way, to explain what God is. God is Love, they will tell us. Or God is all-knowing, or all-powerful. This description of God often has human attributes, and in the Bible interacted with humans. This is more like the solar spirituality we discussed just now, a faith in a visible, accessible God that you could understand. But what happens when that goes away? I’m reminded of the story of Mother Teresa, who spent years unable to sense the presence of God. She felt that God had withdrawn from her, that a dark cloud had descended over her, and she believed that somehow she had failed in her faith.
But if we practice a lunar spirituality, we have an understanding of dark times, of waxing and waning presence.
And in fact, there is also a negative way to encounter the Holy, a via negativa. Theologians and philosophers who follow this negative way believe that God is a mystery, and not knowable. This is often the description of God used by mystics. Perhaps there is a presence, but it cannot be seen or known, and it has no name. The Holy cannot be limited by our human description of it. As Saint Augustine wrote, “If you can grasp it, it isn’t God.” This reminded me of the Coalsack Nebula, where what is created, the light of the stars, is obscured by a giant dust cloud. The darkness, the mystery, is hiding what is behind it.
When is nothing, something? I was thinking about this recently when I visited the new Winslow Homer exhibit in Boston. The descriptions accompanying Homer’s watercolors pointed out areas where he kept the paper blank: applied no paint. There were areas of the painting where there was nothing, that helped to create the whole.
To create the whole is what we all seek to do: to join the sunlight and the shadow, fallow times and times of growth, hope and despair, waxing and waning, sometimes a bright presence close by, and sometimes just a point of light in the night sky.
My friends, like the moon, hope can be elusive. It can seem to disappear, and to leave us bereft, in darkness. We are taught throughout our lives to seek out sunlight and not shadow, to orient ourselves toward the bright times of life, to place our hope in the longer days and in the light. But consider adapting ourselves to a more lunar approach to life. Consider adapting to the dark, embracing it, exploring what it might offer. It takes more faith than turning toward the light. But at times when hope is hard to find, knowing how to make our way in darkness can offer new life, new hope, new comfort.
May we be a church that can embrace both light and darkness, presence and absence, joy and sorrow; a church that helps us to be whole.
Remember always that life begins in the dark.
May it be so,
Amen.
