What Turns Up (The New Pornographers)

image courtesy aphotoshooter (Flikr)

"What's love, 
what's love, 
what's love,
but what turns up in the dark?"

In these days closing in on the winter solstice, what I want to do is grow meditative with the darkness, but I often catch myself just resenting the long nights, like I'm racing to complete as much as possible before the last blue seeps from the sky.

Fact is, everything about how I live (cell phone, work schedule, holiday list) resists a meaningful way to move in harmony with the rhythms of light and dark, life and death, at this time of year. I know this, and yet I can't always stop myself. My cultural training is to think of the darkness as ending, as loss, as emptiness. After all, when people say, "she's carrying a lot of darkness in her" they usually don't mean that as a good thing.

"Up in the Dark" feels like a song about this sort of negative darkness: secrets and hiding. Fear and deception. And yet in the midst of all these "dark" emotions, love shows up. Not what I expected from an Indie pop song. 'Desire,' maybe, 'hopelessness,' possibly, but in fact, the refrain suggests that love, by definition, is 'what turns up in the dark'. 

First question: When has Love shown up for you "in the dark?"


Up in the Dark from The New Pornographers on Myspace.

Yet as much as the prevailing culture around me has taught me to understand darkness in only one way, I have also learned that darkness is where the roots grow. Even during this dark season, as the plants and trees sleep, a greening energy is moving deep within the heart of things. Life is stripped to its core so that it may return renewed. Darkness deepens life.

"What turns up in the dark?
What turns up in the dark?"

Second question: When have you discovered Love waiting for you in the shelter of darkness?

Could it be true that not only does Love not abandon us to the darkness, 
but a sheltering and peaceful darkness is what can help Love grow strongest? Could it be true that befriending the darkness, where it doesn't threaten to engulf us, could be a way to understand our belovedness more fully, to understand God as our Ground-of-All-Being more totally? Could it be true that in the dark all the exhausting running and hiding and games can end, the veil can be dropped, and we can encounter our vulnerability and truth within community and with God?

You who live in the shelter of the Most High,

    who abide in the shadow of the Almighty,

will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress;

    my God, in whom I trust.” 

- Psalm 91: 1-2

So as we dwell in the shadows of some of the darkest days of the year, may we hold the paradox of this space well: the possibility and the difficulty, the life and the death. May we remember that in this solstice darkness we are invited to die to old ways of clinging and lying, hiding and fearing, while also inviting our deepest wholeness and renewal in that very same darkness. May we remember that Christ dwells in this Advent space, in this almost-Christmas space, ready to be born in darkness, ready to be encountered in darkness, ready to be fully revealed in light.

All we need is this time in the dark.

Shine on.

                                                                                    -- Anna