Lighten our Darkness

I never thought of it until this moment, but most people write black letters on white paper. I, on the other hand, post white letters on a black page---this blog.

Why did I choose a black background template? There were so many others. Most people who know me a little might have expected me to choose blue. Those who know me very well indeed would not have been surprised if I had chosen green. But not even I, in my secretest soul, could have told you why I chose black. Or perhaps I could, and perhaps it would be a highly prosaic reason. "It looked classy," I might say. "Everything else seemed too ordinary."

Ordinary. Extraordinary. It makes me think of pastels versus jewel tones. It also makes me think of Victor Hugo, whose style of writing is so filled with jewel tones and dark backgrounds: bursts of vividness and emotion against the grotesque shadow. He was a master of the art of contrast. He understood black and white.

But did he understand dark and light? When I read of his last words, my heart shuddered. They were, "Je vois une lumiere noire”—“I see a dark light.” I shuddered at them because Christians do not see dark lights when they die. They see dawning lights. Or they see through darkness to light. But they do not see a dark light---dark light is what one associates with the ruddy glow of Hell. Thus, when I read those words, my soul feared for Hugo's soul.

But these last few weeks, I have repeatedly felt Hugo's last words echoed in myself. Lately, the old wildness and aching have come upon me again, and where I turn from darkness I find myself in darkness still. I feel lost, like a little one caught out far from home in a storm. It is always this way with me, since I was really a child. It is my old enemy, the one that sent me almost out of my mind with terror of night, of the black skies and cold stars, of death, of not-being-as-I-am.

It sends me back to the time when I was still a child, one rather like both Hugo's Cosette and his Eponine: bitter, paralyzed, stunted, unable to love, a little girl who seemed born an old woman. Only it was not society that did it to me---it was I, my sin, my self. I believed that love could not be for such as I, such crawling sin as I, and I hated God for being just, because I knew what that meant for me: death.

Oh, how death frightened me! Picture a little girl---eight, ten, thirteen years old, all those years---who would lie still thinking and imagining the not-being of death, and the loneliness of it, and the darkness of it, until she woke screaming from a nightmare she had had without even closing her eyes. To this day, my soul surges out in compassion to all those who hate God and fear death with a terrible heart-cracking fear, because I remember. And sometimes, as during these last weeks, I do not merely remember---I regress.

Oh, that I could rip out those years and bury them! That I could have done with them forever! You, reader---do you know what it is to hate God, to blaspheme Him in your heart, to abhor Scripture, to despise wisdom? Do you know what it is to believe, truly believe for all of ten hellish years, that no one could ever love you, because you are too foul? Did you ever become a master of isolation, a person who knew instinctively how to construct a wall between yourself and every person near you---and did? Have you ever taught yourself how to coldly analyze other human beings down to the last detail, so that you may render them incapable of touching your heart? Have you ever lived without a single particle of trust for any being in the universe, believing them all to be bent on causing you pain? Were you ever such a child? Were you ever so wretchedly self-absorbed, so miserably self-deceived? Did you ever tell yourself the lie that your family hated you? Did you ever imagine and pretend yourself into a waking, walking, living nightmare?

And they want vivid imaginations! Reader, when you have lived ten years caught between my imagination and my sin nature, then you will know what a curse an imagination can be. The sanctified imagination, dear reader, is the only kind worth having. The other will drive you insane.

Was I ought of my mind, truly? I suppose not, but sometimes I thought so. Then... ah, then. He. It was a split-shattering bolt of lightning, when God revealed Himself to me one otherwise-unremarkable evening in late summer. He seared and healed me all at once. He undid and remade me with a few words, which were the most impossible words of all for me to hear. People told me all my life, "God loves you." I did not believe them. Then he ripped open the ceiling of my mind, shocked me with a vision of light and a voice---I believe it was His---that said "I love you." And suddenly, I believed Him.

I still do, and more each day. I thought darkness was unbearable, until I learned that light is still harder to bear---to be shattered by joy is more completely shattering than to be shattered by pain. I am learning to endure more and more of light. Oh happy, happy pain!

But sin has consequences, and they are hard to bear. Mine is the recurring nightmare, which now no longer hangs an inky curtain before my waking eyes---thank God!---but does still come to jab at me with black daggers.

A dream that my parents are dead. A sudden waking in the night, afraid that the house is on fire. A shock because of a slight change in sound, light, or vibration. An acute conviction that I have just been struck. Or, worse of all, a dull leaden certainty that the people whom I love do not, cannot love me. A desire to run away from home. A longing for the silence of absolute solitude, where one might be free from the pain of hearing "you don't matter to me," but at the same time a terror of loneliness.

Such feelings always come when I am weakest: weary from long hours of work, or more often from long hours compounded over the course of weeks, as these last weeks have been. Sometimes I lean my eyes against my hand and sit absolutely still, waiting either for strength to go on or for the clamor in my mind and heart to die down a little so that I can go on. My prayers at such times are the simplest of pleas, a silent begging: "Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God!"

No, this is not the first time. That is partly what gives me hope; that I have been brought through this before. I remember a night last winter, a wild, freezing night near Christmas, when my mind and heart were like knives through me, and then I ran and ran through my forest in the bitter cold, longing to feel exhausted by something powerful that was outside myself. I could not bear the tempest of my own emotions. If Cosette in Hugo's story was terrified by the dark forest at night, I was the opposite. I longed for it, for anything that would interfere with my interior struggle and draw my senses out of myself. And I found it, ironically enough, in the black coldness of the night.

For, dear reader, in looking at real sky and real stars, and in feeling a real wind knife through me, and feeling my limbs trembling from real exhaustion, I was forced to think of God. I was too tired to think any more inwardly.

For in such cases it is the inward thoughts that are to be feared. If by grace one can force the thoughts and feelings outwards, towards God, towards truth, towards love for other people, towards anything of that sort, then there is immediate relief, followed by healing. But let the thoughts turn inward, listen to yourself instead of talking to yourself, follow your heart---most fatal choice!---and immediately there is only a black spiral downward, towards a dark light that seems to give off no actual light, but rather suffocation.

Therefore I will look up and away. I refuse the nightmare. If, when I turn from darkness, I find only darkness, I will stand still and quiet, and begin to pray for light. Gentle reader, make no mistake about this: whoever asks, receives. Once God has revealed Himself to you, there is always light available. Always. Only, one must ask.

Petitio, Domine. Petitio.