“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.” Genesis 1:1-5, NRSV

I have heard these words from Genesis hundreds of times, you probably have too, or at least some version of them. We know the story that God created light and in creating light created Day. But to tell the truth, I always just thought that ‘night’ was the absence of ‘day,’ not that ‘night’ was actually Night, a named, defined, created space. Night is not a part of Day, there is Day and there is Night, two distinct experiences that together make up a unique space in time.

I also always thought night followed day, I bet you did too. Recently I was listening to the Bema Podcast and as the teacher spoke about this part of Genesis they highlighted the fact that the evening, the Night, came before the morning and the Day. You don’t start with Day, you don’t start with light. The first thing present was dark. The experience of a cycle of rotation of the earth starts with evening. How interesting then, that we dominate our lives by the presence of light.

Light is good. Light provides nourishment and warmth and energy, it is necessary for growth, it is necessary to see, there is safety in light. But notice in the text, notice in the function of the cosmos, light does not eliminate dark. We have both, not at the same time, but we have both because we need both. When God spoke light into the formless void and saw that it was good, certainly God could have said, ‘well that is good so we will keep just the light.’ No, God saw the light, saw that it was good, and kept it with the dark so that there would be both evening, and morning. We need both, it is built into the very function of our existence.

I worry about a world where we don’t seem to know what to do with the dark. I worry about that literally and metaphorically. We don’t know what to do with the “dark” of our feelings and so we medicate them to make them “light.” We don’t like the seasons of darkness and so we light up the world around us deny ourselves the experience of faith required to trust that the light will indeed return. And we lose the experience of awe in the promise fulfilled for the short term satiety of a decoration.

I live in an area that does not have street lights, up on a hill that is adjacent to wild spaces. There are owls and coyotes and fox and mountain lion, bats, moths, and all manner of things I can’t name because I don’t see them. The dark is where they function. The dark is what they need to live. And there are houses in the neighborhood that have taken away all of the space where dark exists. It’s pretty with trees coated in lights (sometimes flashing different colors), and strings of fairy lights across every available pole, bow, and bush. But it’s never dark, and I worry not just for the creatures that need the dark, I worry to for the people, for all of us, when we don’t allow ourselves the quiet, comfort, challenge of the dark.

Sometimes the literal night can feel very long and perhaps we fear that the light will never return, sometimes the metaphorical night can feel impossible to survive and we stop trusting that there is a light of love that is there for us. But if we never allow ourselves to experience the dark, the Night, we stop being able to recognize the day, the Light, it all just blurs into one experience. We don’t know how to be the light for others if we never experience the darkness ourselves, we forget how to seek Light when we try to create a reality in which there is no dark.

God created light, and it is good. But God kept dark. We need both. We need to see that both exist, both have a purpose, a time and place, within us and without. There are moments of darkness for all of us, there are moments of light for all of us, we were not meant to live in one place only and forever, but to trust in the movement of creation that is all good.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.