When light is born from the womb of Darkness

Sermon delivered on December 19, 2022 at the New Thought Spiritual Center of Eastern Long Island. Slightly edited to make sense in written form. Video at the bottom.

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Tehom el tehom korei…
From the deep, I call to you.

~ The Hebrew Bible, psalm 43 (melody by Taya Shere)

Here, she/he - the Hebrew God – is calling us. Not from the heights, but from the depths.

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Before I start, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that we are standing on the ancestral grounds of the Shinnecock and the Mauntaukett people. These are the ancestors and the caretakers of this land. Their land has been taken - their language, their culture, has been taken - without permission. I ask for forgiveness from the ancestors of this land, and from the spirit of this land - for all that has been done in the name of civilization.

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I want to start with an admission. You know, I had written out a talk for today. It was very erudite, making all these points and so forth. But it was feeling very jagged to me. Disjointed. It didn't sit quite right. And then, two or three nights ago, I woke up in the middle of the night. I couldn't fall back asleep. I was kind of in this half-awake half-asleep state, and I heard this voice. It was literally a voice that said: “Forget about all that! Just speak to Dottie!” So, that what I'm going to do today. I will speak to Dottie.*

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So, the title that I chose for today's presentation is “when light is born from the womb of Darkness.” I want us to focus on those words - the Womb, and the Darkness.

We have all grown up, and been acculturated, in religions, w well as secular structures, that emphasize light. And denigrate Darkness. Light is good. God is light. And darkness - the body, and matter - are bad. In fact, the Latin word, “mater,” from where we get our word matter, and material, literally means “mother.” So, by denigrating darkness, we have denigrated the feminine. The mother who births us. And of course, it is not a big step from denigrating darkness, to creating social structures such as colonialism and slavery. All of these, in some ways, are the result of this dichotomy, this binarization, of light and dark.

Today, part of my intention is to rehabilitate this dark womb-space. This space where there's fecundity. There is possibility. There is life.

I want to start with a reading from Rilke. The Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows. The poem is from his “Book of Hours.” This is what the poet says:

You, darkness, of whom I am born —

I love you more than the flame
that limits the world
to the circle it illumines
and excludes all the rest.

But the darkness embraces everything:
shapes and shadows, creatures and me,
people, nations — just as they are.

It lets me imagine
a great presence stirring beside me.

I believe in the night.

Here, the poet is talking about the firelight creating a perimeter. Everything within that perimeter is illuminated, and everything outside of it is dark. Everything outside of it is “otherized.” It's the other. It's not me. But in darkness, there is no perimeter. Everything is included. Darkness is a place of potentiality, where everything is possible.

Let us imagine for a moment this womb-time. This womb-space. This place that is dark. That is moist, warm. A place where there is absolute rest. And the great silence. Or… we can imagine that seed that is underground, waiting for spring. Feeling that restful quietude. Feeling in us that longing, that yearning, for this quiet time. This inward time. This time where I don't have to do a million things…

And as we wait for the Divine Child of Light to be born out of this Womb of Darkness, we take a moment to acknowledge the mother, the womb, the place where this divine child is gestated. It is a place of hope, of expectation, of leaving the candle burning… But it is also the time of deep, deep rest.

I want to acknowledge that time.

And we are in that time right now. Today is the first day of Hanukkah. We're in the middle of Advent. Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere is around the corner. It is the time when the whole world, the living earth herself, is in conversation between light and darkness.

And so are we.

The problem, as I said earlier, is that we humans have created these structures, these religious structures - which have later been secularized, that has really created this Apollonian model. This model where the highest value is assigned to the mind, the light, the heights, the ascension. I would say most of our religions are ascensionist religions. They want us to start from the ground and move up. And let go of the darker, heavier pieces.

What if, instead, we went with the indigenous people - who speak about the structure of the world as circular? Where things come and go? Things are born and they die…

I sometimes think of this place as a dark temple - with two doors. One door is the tomb, where we enter the temple, as we leave this (living) space. And then, the other door is the womb, from where we come out into the light again. So, we are constantly cycling. Both the big death – that of our physical bodies, as well as the little deaths, and the little births, that we have all the time. All those little hopes, those aspirations and dreams, that are no longer going to come true… Can we really let them rest… so they can be metamorphosed? So they can be alchemized into a whole new, surprising thing? Because this is a place of potentiality. We don't know what's going to be born out of it. That's the really cool thing about this place.

Take the story of Jesus in the tomb… When Jesus died on the cross, and entered the tomb, he didn't know that he was going to come out of it. Because if he did know ahead of time, then the whole mystery is lost! It is that place of mystery. That place where everything is possible.

I think sometimes we're afraid of this place, partly because darkness in our minds conjures up death. That's the biggest Darkness. Death, in many cultures, and for many of us who have kind of moved away from the old mythos - is oblivion. It's the ultimate ending. It’s the place of “I no longer exist.”

Here, I want to share with you a very brief shloke (verse) from the Bhagavad-Gita. Here Krishna, the god incarnate, is talking to his disciple Arjuna. They are talking about this moment of death. I will first recite it in Sanskrit and then I'll translate it. This is how it goes in Sanskrit:

vasansi jirnani yatha vihaya
navani grhnati naro 'parani
tatha sarirani vihaya jirnanyanyani
sanyati navani dehi

Translated, it means that just like we humans, when our clothes are worn and tattered, we throw them away and wear new clothes – similarly, when the body is old and tattered, our soul throws it away, and wears a new body.

So, death and life are just that cyclical process!

It is up to us, whether we want to believe in reincarnation or not. But that's not even the point! The point, for me at least, is… can I rest peacefully in that unknowing? Because, really, we cannot know. But can I rest in the unknowing? That, I think, is the real invitation. And it's beautiful to contemplate.

I have two lines from Mary Oliver, another of my favorite poets. Just two lines, but it's so beautiful! She says:

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

And now, we are learning the same thing in science. We know now that all that we see - all the matter, all the energy - that is visible, that is quantifiable, that is measurable - is just five percent of what's in the universe. The rest of it is dark matter and dark energy. That is 95 percent of all there is! We do not even have the tools to measure them, because all our tools have come out of our light-centric thinking! We are only now beginning to search for adequate tools, because otherwise, the equations don't make sense!

There’s something else I think about often. As you know, I'm a scientist. I do imaging. Microscopy. That's my work. So, I often think about how, in order to get a good image, you need the light to come into an absolute dark place. Think of an old-fashioned camera. If you had a light leak in the camera, the photo will be washed out! So, it's only in that place of darkness where light can be operationalized, where it can make sense to us.

Sometimes, I also think of the visual cortex of the brain. Okay, so light's coming in through my eyes. But where it is making sense, is at the back of my head, inside the skull, where there is absolute darkness. That's the visual cortex, right there at the back of my head!

This is not to say, “light is bad, and dark is good; let's flip the story!” But it is to say: let's really learn how to dance with both! That's the invitation.

Here's a little piece from John O'Donohue, another of my favorite writers. It's from his audio program, Longing and Belonging. This is a prose piece. He says:

Celtic spirituality, in its finest moments, has a wonderful hospitality to the threshold where contradictions actually meet... It really is the hidden world which produces all color. William Blake said colors are the wounds of light. But in a way, too, color is the fruit of darkness. Because without the fecundity of the inner dark, there will be no external color at all.

That is true. An object that reflects all light is white, and an object that absorbs all light is black. And an object that absorbs some of the light and reflects some of the life light has color. Imagine a world without color! Color is possible because light and darkness have this dance happening. Dance of mother and child, or of the lovers… however you want to conjure them!

I know I have very little time left. So, I'm going to leave you with one last poem. It's one of my favorites. It's also from John O'Donohue. It’s called “For Light,” from his book “To Bless the Space Between Us.”

Here the poet plays with the different kinds of light.

Light cannot see inside things.
That is what the dark is for:
Minding the interior,
Nurturing the draw of growth
Through places where death
In its own way turns into life.

In the glare of neon times,
Let our eyes not be worn
By surfaces that shine
With hunger made attractive.

That our thoughts may be true light,
Finding their way into words
Which have the weight of shadow
To hold the layers of truth.

That we never place our trust
In minds claimed by empty light,
Where one-sided certainties
Are driven by false desire.

When we look into the heart,
May our eyes have the kindness
And reverence of candlelight.  

That the searching of our minds
Be equal to the oblique  

Crevices and corners where
The mystery continues to dwell,
glimmering in fugitive light.

When we are confined inside
The dark house of suffering
That moonlight might find a window.

When we become false and lost
That the severe noon-light
Would cast our shadow clear.

When we love, that dawn-light
Would lighten our feet
Upon the waters.

As we grow old, that twilight
Would illuminate treasure
In the fields of memory.

And when we come to search for God,
Let us first be robed in night,
Put on the mind of morning
To feel the rush of light
Spread slowly inside
The color and stillness
Of a found world.

Thank you.

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*[Dottie, one of my students from the One Spirit seminary, is an active member of this congregation. She has been battling serious health challenges ever since I have known her. Yet, she keeps showing up, again and again. Her tenacity in the face of this immense adversity has been a deep lesson for me.]