Fertile Darkness

On giving Christ space in our souls

The life of Jesus Christ begins in a dark cave.

Twice, at Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem (the stable was very likely a cave, and the manger hewn of rough stone), and again, at His ‘new birth’ of the resurrection, God is born in a cave. In both cases, Divine life entered our human family in a new way, and in both cases the great revelation was preceded by time spent in darkness, literally underground.

In this mystery, we have a model of how God comes to us, and of how we can consent to God’s movement in our hearts. We all walk around with a sense of self, made up of a lifetime’s worth of memories, thoughts, emotions, and developed personality traits and habits. We have a functioning ‘self’ that we use to navigate the world, and it more or less gets us through our days. Yet, unless we are already saints, our ‘operational ego’ or ‘self’ also serves to keep the fullness of God at bay. Christ longs to dwell within us, to fill us with His Holy Spirit, and to animate every aspect of our being. The baseline state of our egoic self is focused on survival in this world, and on getting things done. It’s constantly looking outward, for what to do, to fulfill our desires and preferences, or even simply our daily commitments and obligations. An additional challenge in this era, at least in the West, is that our culture is almost exclusively oriented around the surface of things, based in a materialist worldview that is blind to deeper realities.

To receive Christ more fully, then, we need to step away from the ordinary light of our daily activities and concerns, and enter a fertile darkness. When we withdraw from the outer self, either for a few minutes of prayer, or for days of retreat, or simply by setting down the hurry of the secular holiday season to move slowly, we give our souls some time and space to gestate. One old Catholic term for this movement is ‘recollection’. It refers to withdrawing our soul from outer concerns to contemplate God. It is traditionally described as both a specific movement of prayer, and also a state (‘interior recollection’) that, with patient discipline, a Christian can acquire and use to remain mindful of God’s presence throughout the rest of daily life. The whole way of life of contemplative religious orders (Carmelites, Trappists, Carthusians) is designed to creative conditions conducive to acquiring interior recollection. It’s also an intention for how we life our life at Metanoia. While life with three young children is necessarily more outward than a contemplative religious order, we still strive to minimize exterior distractions and create a fertile, spacious atmosphere for guests and for ourselves to listen to the voice of God, and to respond.

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In my 30 years of following Christ as an adult, I’ve become convinced that some degree of darkness, silence and stillness are prerequisites for the birth of something authentically spirit-filled, both in our individual lives and in the lives our our communities and institutions. God can’t easily ‘get in’ through the barriers of our egos and our agendas (both personal and collective) when we stay on the surface, constantly trying to accomplish more. A sort of functional materialism easily creeps into our Christian lives, when we see it as our duty to be constantly active, doing more ‘for God’, as our highest religious duty. Yet, when we turn to see how it is that Jesus Christ came into the world, we see that he began in stillness, and in darkness. What if we were to turn, more fully, more regularly, and more consciously, towards God’s creative darkness?

This is, of course, the invitation of Advent. The word literally means ‘coming into being’, and it’s the liturgical season where we’re invited to wait, in silence and stillness, for Christ to come - to come into the world, and to come anew into our hearts. Advent takes place, intentionally, at the time of the deepest darkness of the earth, inviting us to join in the stillness of the trees and the hibernating animals. Earth and Christian liturgy alike invite us to wait - trusting the God is at work in the silence. When we wait, we give God the opportunity to re-shape us, and to bring about a new spiritual reality in our hearts.

There’s something profoundly anti-spiritual in the great materialist thrust of ‘secular christmas.’¹ At precisely the time when our souls yearn to enter into the fertile darkness of God, in communion with pregnant Mary, the anti-spiritual culture screams ‘only five more shopping days to Christmas!’ and tries to pull us outward. We each have a part of our soul that finds patience difficult, and it’s inherently hard on the ego to wait, to pray, and to allow itself to be creatively dismantled by the workings of the Holy Spirit. So, there’s a part within us that is also all too happy to be led outward, to be distracted, and to engage with the noise, hurry and crowds of the ‘holiday season’. I suspect that the season has developed its excess and fervor, in the USA at least, precisely because it offers our collective psyches a way to avoid the discomfort that sometimes accompanies slowing down and turning inward. As a collective, we Americans don’t like negative feelings, introspection, or slowing down. Why feel the emptiness and hunger in our souls, when we could just shop?

Yet it is precisely the turning inward, and the stripping down of outward distractions, that allows our hearts to ‘prepare Him room²’ to dwell within us. Advent is traditionally a penitential season, similar to Lent. The Church has long understood that we must allow God to empty us out if we are to be able to receive the Divine Light with greater fullness at Christmas (and at Easter). The Lent-Easter cycle is more obvious, outward, dramatic and archetypically masculine - it begins with the man Jesus fasting in the desert and climaxes with His brutal torture, murder, and astounding resurrection. The Advent-Christmas cycle is more subtle, inward, calm and archetypically feminine. It begins with the woman Mary’s ‘yes’ to God, and climaxes with her giving birth in an underground cave. Yet, both point to a similar reality of the necessity of letting go, stripping down, turning inward, and trusting in God in a period of often uncomfortable yet spiritually redemptive waiting. It is a season of darkness, yet it is a fertile darkness. It is in this fertile darkness, both in the world and in our souls, where Jesus Christ gestates and will be born anew. Let us wait in prayerful hope.

“Within our darkest night, you kindle the fire that never dies away.”

-From a hymn from the Taize monastic community (seen here)

1. No, I won’t dignify it with a capital ‘C’

2. As the beloved Christmas hymn advises:

Joy to the world! The Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven, and heaven, and nature sing.