Light/Dark

Genesis 1:1-5New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

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, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 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. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

This week I started reading the book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, by Barbara Brown Taylor (or BBT as I affectionately refer to her as!).  It's a wonderful book that challenges the assumption that darkness is necessarily a bad thing.  It says that we have been conditioned by parents, by church, and by life, to see darkness as the opposite of light, and therefore bad.

Light, however, says BBT, isn't always good.  

And darkness can be wonderful.

Both are important and both are God-given and God-made.  And here in Genesis, darkness in fact comes before light.  Darkness is the start.  Darkness is the beginning.

We are in dark in the womb and it is in darkness that we are meant to sleep and rest so that our bodies may be strengthened and grow.

It's a book that has really been thought provoking for me - especially the challenges in about always thinking that light is a good thing.  I remember as a child always loving the dark, and somewhere along the way I learned to fear it.  That is BBT's general premise: that fear of the dark is something learned, not something man made.

Here in Genesis 1 you get the full sense of balance that God means with darkness and light.  You don't want one without the other.  If you ever saw the old Al Pacino film, "Insomnia" or have ever lived in Alaska or Scandinavia, you know that too much light can be just as unsettling as too much dark!

'Here the writer of the Genesis poem simply tells us that God says the light is good.  But I'll bet that despite all the places in the Bible where darkness is shown as evil, that God sees that the darkness is good.

Are there places in your life where darkness can be a healing balm?

God of life, help us to find you in all the light and dark places in our lives and see the goodness of all of your creation.  Amen.