From Your Minister
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According to Joshua Friedman, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, “All the visible world that we see around us is just the tip of the iceberg.”
An article in Science News Magazine says that 70% of the universe is “a mysterious entity known as dark energy that pervades all of space, pushing it apart at an ever-faster rate.”
Now, the term “dark energy” can be used to mean frightening or cruel or evil energy. Kind of how Voldemort, the Dark Lord in the Harry Potter books, might be presumed to wield dark energy. But I think of dark energy very differently, as do the scientists. By dark energy, I mean energy that is mysterious, unnamed, as yet unexplored. (I won’t attempt to say what the scientists mean!)
For those of us in cold climates, winter is a good time to ponder dark energy and what gifts it might offer to us. Often, the metaphor for hope is a candle, or a star, or a light, shining in the darkness. Lights are important to help us to see, to guide us. I love the Christmas season when neighbors, for no motivation other than joy and beauty, fill their trees with lights, hang lights on their gutters, put candles in their windows. What’s not to love about light?
But while we are all grateful for the lanterns, beacons and lighthouses that keep us on our course, I don’t think the light is where we primarily find hope. I think that the actual stuff of hope, the actual mysterious components that create it, can be found in the darkness, though we need to haul it out into the light if we are to describe it to one another. In the darkness we sense there is something new we need to see, and we fumble for the match to light the candle. In that impulse—the desire to see and the fumbling for light—is the birth of hope. Finding hope takes place in darkness, and the hope we find becomes light when we are moved to share it with each other. It is because we have been in darkness that we are moved to light lanterns for each other.
For instance, you tell me amazing stories from your lives. You tell me that because of a line about loving-kindness in one of Lynn Ungar’s Quest columns, your heart opened, despite almost two decades spent in prison, where to behave kindly is dangerous. You tell me that because of finding this online community of open-spirited living, and finally having someone affirm your own experience of your lived faith, you were moved to contact a friend whom you treated badly long ago. You tell me that you are determined to find love, even though you are not sure how you will do it and were not taught to expect it as a child, when you learned cruelty instead. You tell me that you yell at your kids, and you hate that you do so and you want to stop, but you don’t know how. You tell me, over and over, that what you know is just the tip of the iceberg and that underneath it, mysteriously, some accelerating force compels you to change your course, even now, even here.
When you honor me by sharing these stories, you may feel you are wandering in the darkness, but your very courage to be there gives me hope. Your stories—often full of more questions than answers, often including phrases like “I don’t know,” “overwhelmed,” “lost”—your very stories give me hope, because by telling them you are claiming your own worth and value.
You share your stories believing that I, too, will see their worth and value, thus according me that most precious gift of any season—trust. I find hope in your courage to confide your story to me or to other CLF members in covenant groups, Facebook groups, list serves, classes. The hope is in your longing—longing that is bigger than your pain. Because even in your pain you are saying, “I know that this is the tip of the iceberg,” and you are resting deeply on the large part of the universe that is mystery, that will hold you.
I sometimes hear pundits or other cultural voices say something like this: “At my age, nothing really surprises me any more.” But that’s not what I hear from CLF members, nor what I experience myself. We are saying: At every age, until the moment we draw our last breath, there is still room to be surprised. There is still room to learn, to grow, to open, to accompany one another on our journeys, no matter where those journeys may lead.
Hope is not for the naive, for the young, for the unseasoned. Hope is always beckoning to us, no matter whether we can see it, no matter whether we can put it into words; no matter whether it comes in the form we expected it. Hope pervades all of life, if we have the courage to see it. And once we know it, we feel no choice but to offer it to others as a gift.
Be kind to yourselves in this hectic season. Allow yourselves time to soak in the darkness, to allow it to nurture your deepest places, to allow yourself to know that, especially where you can’t see it, you are held.
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