Dark Journeys

Listen: “Black Sun” by Death Cab for Cutie

Caveat: Many people have gone through deep depression or a life crises that completely altered their worldview. Maybe not you, but a friend or relative. The purpose of this blog is not to wallow in darkness or hopelessness, but to provide hope. Knowing that “you are not alone” is a powerful point of connection and hope for people going through a dark journey. It also creates hope to realize that even the darkest of journeys can find light.

Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard—so tangled and rough
And savage that thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter
And yet, to treat the good I found there as well
I’ll tell you what I saw…

—(The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation by Robert Pinskey)

In the recovery community, hell is not a threat. “We’ve been through hell” is a common phrase. And perhaps it’s a journey we all face. In my darkest of days, questioning everything I ever believed, I ran across this translation of Dante’s epic poem. “That’s me.” I thought. It’s the opening lines of Dante’s epic midlife crises, a journey he takes through hell, purgatory, and paradise. All of the symphonic drama of life captured in an epic poem—one written seven hundred years ago, but still resonates with the human condition. (For a modern classic on adult developmental issues, see Daniel Levinson, The Seasons of a Man’s Life and The Seasons of a Woman’s Life.)

We don’t like the theme of darkness. I don’t like spiritual darkness. In 2019, if “ten” represents feeling on top of the world, victorious and in the light, and “one” represents the depths of darkness, suicidal thoughts streaming—I was a “two.” Day after day I woke hoping I was in a bad dream, but I wasn’t. The darkness was real. The hole I dug for myself was caving in around me. Day after day.

Yet darkness is a part of the spiritual journey. We don’t sign up for it. We don’t want it. But it comes to us in many forms and ways; sometimes our own doing and sometimes not. What do we do with the darkness? Can we embrace it without being consumed by it? Can we learn from it? Even make friends with it?

Virgil spoke of the journey thirteen hundred years before Dante, and Virgil was a companion with Dante in his journey. Virgil writes:

            It is easy to go down into Hell;
night and day, the gates of dark
Death stand wide; but to climb
back again, to retrace one’s
steps to the upper air—there’s
the rub, the task.

                        —The Aeneid, Book VI, line 192

To journey through it, to learn from it, and to ascend despite it; this is the challenge. Matthew Fox describes how most of us are addicted to the light. “We whore after more—more images, more light, more profits, more goodies.” Yet human growth takes place in the dark. Under ground. In subterranean passages. “A light-oriented spirituality is superficial, surface-like, lacking as it does the deep, dark roots that nourish and surprise and ground the large tree” (Original Blessing by Matthew Fox). 

If you’ve grown up in a belief system which provides quick, easy answers in black and white, then the answers fail you, the confidence ebbs away and you’re left with—nothing it seems. It’s pitch dark. You grasp to feel, to touch objects, to find a path; but nothing, air maybe, light has dissipated. Questions lead to questions.

Listening in the dark, to the dark, in the absence of noise is terrifying, yet letting go leads to—a strange peace. Grasping to control, we give up. Go still. Silent. Maybe just floating, in a dark nothingness. (I’ve never tried a float tank, but maybe I should.) There’s something there. Not nothing. Can I learn to hear?

Listen to Rilke in “The Dark Hours of My Being:”

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

 Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless

 So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:

a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.

I long for the “knowing to come” so “I can open to another life that’s wide and timeless.” Through this journey of darkness, I have hope. In the words of T. S. Eliot:

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving\
Into another intensity
For another union, a deeper communion

            —“East Coker”

 I’m on journey, learning to read the darkness. Shadows hint of light (Psalm 23).

Shalom

©realfredherron 2020