Waiting for the Light of Christ

By Kathy Berken
On Deck

A friend who grew up in Clinton and now lives in Alabama joked in late November that the days are so short now that she has her morning coffee, reads her mail and after her afternoon snack, puts on her pajamas for bed. I replied, “Just wait until December!”

Instead of living in St. Paul, Minnesota where at the winter solstice on Dec. 21 we will get about nine hours of daylight, I could live in the Norwegian city of Longyearbyen, the northernmost permanent settlement in the world, where the residents experience a “polar night” of no sun for several months.

Most of us hunger these days for the sun to return in the early morning and stay with us until at least 9 or 10 p.m. In Longyearbyen, the people embrace the darkness. A Smithsonian Magazine article from Oct. 17 spoke of a journalist who went there to write about polar night and hoped to describe the challenges of living through this long period of darkness.

Instead of complaints, he was surprised that most people actually appreciated the enchantment of the polar night. The village became an even closer-knit community as they found beauty in the calm and peaceful atmosphere of life in the darkness that welcomed a slower, more relaxed rhythm. However, most people do wear headlamps during the day to get around!

It’s easy to compare our Advent waiting for the Light of Christ at Christmas to our December waiting for the Winter Solstice and for longer days of sunlight. A profound connection exists between the darkness of the polar night — and even our Midwest dark December — and St. John of the Cross’ “dark night of the soul.”

I believe that the people of Longyearbyen can be excellent role models for how to face our journeys into physical and spiritual darkness. When we feel that the Light of Christ has dimmed or even gone out in our souls, we may become depressed and confused. I hear this so often in my visits with people who tell me their faith has disappeared and they don’t feel the same awareness of God’s presence as before. Where has that light gone or, more exactly, where is God now?

Curiously, the 16th-century Spanish mystic’s “dark night of the soul” is actually a gift from God, a period in one’s spiritual life that purifies the spirit and turns our face toward God once again. We do not choose this spiritual darkness willingly, just as we don’t choose the earth’s movement causing changes in sunlight throughout the year.

If we simply dismiss the darkness of our December days as routine and find ourselves musing about the longer days to come without any sense of beauty and wonder for the night, as the residents of Longyearbyen do, I think we miss an opportunity for spiritual growth. While we use the weeks of Advent to prepare for the coming of the Christ Child, we might think of using the sun-starved days of this season to discover the same beauty in the calm and peaceful atmosphere of life in the darkness just as the Norwegian people of the northernmost city in the world do.

All of these things connect intimately: our limited December sunlight, the dark night of the soul, the winter solstice and our celebration of Christmas, the birth of Christ, the Light of the world.

Taking the time to reflect and meditate on each aspect of dark and light can give us a deeper meaning to these days, as St. John aptly wrote, “In a dark night, with anxious love inflamed, O, happy lot! Forth unobserved I went, My house being now at rest.”

(Kathy Berken is a spiritual director and retreat leader in St. Paul, Minnesota. She lived and worked at L’Arche in Clinton  — The Arch from 1999-2009.)