Befriending Good Friday Darkness

While staying alone at a friend’s woodland cabin one Good Friday night, I turned off the lights and stepped outside for a walk. My eyes needed a few minutes to adjust until silhouettes of bushes, trees, and clumps of weeds emerged from the blackness. Darkness changes even the familiar, and while I knew where the little creek spilled past the end of the driveway and how the area beyond it opened to a path up a hill and along the ridge, I chose my steps carefully, listening to animal sounds and feeling the earth give way beneath my feet. Night heightened my senses, alert for danger as well as beauty.

I stepped on the end of a weathered, grey board, part of some long-gone fence or building, and the other end sprung up from the ground, startling me. It seemed alive and aware that we were both in the midst of an unknown something that was on its way or perhaps was already here. The board settled back onto the ground once I continued on my way. I imagined it returned to quiet attention. All creation seemed to be waiting through the night. For what, I didn’t know.

The dark hours of Good Friday invite us to settle into a time of not knowing, of finally sitting peacefully, if not comfortably, with emptiness. These hours offer a time of deepening faith that something transformative is always happening under the surface, at the heart of things. It moves, but we cannot see. It is like seeds buried in cold winter soil or a caterpillar dissolving and recreating in the shroud of its chrysalis. Like Jesus lying in the tomb. Life is at work even in what looks like death.

That truth reveals itself in the “little deaths” that everyone encounters: illness, loss, struggle, depression, uncertainty. At some point we learn that, as much as society tells us we are in control of our lives, we really are not. Some things are beyond our choosing or our making. These opportunities to let go of control and embrace our own powerlessness and uncertainty invite us to grow in trust.

Trust that in the end, as Jesus said, Love cannot be overcome.

He showed us, in his life and in his death, what trusting God’s Presence looks like. He lived knowing he was not alone in his journey and assured us that we aren’t either. In his lifetime, those in power tried to put him to death, to snuff out Love that made them uncomfortable and that threatened their positions of privilege and their ways of life. But Love that is the source of all being would not be destroyed.

Instead, by embracing his own death, Jesus transformed it from an “end” into a “beginning.” We are invited to do the same. To befriend darkness and let it in. To let it open us to surrender and receptivity. The dark times, the Good Fridays, are necessary steps into a new place. Their emptiness provides space for Love to grow deeper and to emerge transformed as Jesus did from the tomb.

At a time when the world is filled with darkness, with violence and hatred and divisions, somewhere, good is happening. Love is growing and changing us and our world. Jesus showed us that it is human to be afraid and angry, but also to trust. Trust that deep down, in places we cannot see or know in the moment, Love is alive and Eastering in us, getting ready to rise and reveal itself again and again.

Good Friday gifts us with the time to sink into quiet, into darkness, to allow ourselves to recognize emptiness and infirmity, mortality and powerlessness and yet, eventually, find hope.

That long ago night at the cabin, I was one with creation, resting in this mystery of not knowing. Unaware of “how,” we are opened to the Eastering that is always transforming us from within. May this Good Friday be that for you.

Eastering

(Unless in silence
Where sings the song?
What means the morning
Unless first the night?
Unless into stillness
Where comes the dance?
Unless into darkness
Where breaks the light?)
Woven warp and weft of things.

© 1977 Mary van Balen