A question about Darkness

   Where is darkness? If I were to put you in a room by yourself (or with a friend, it really doesn't matter) and turned the lights off on you and ask you to point out darkness what would you say? Is darkness something that can be defined? Is it something tangible that you can see and touch? And if you could identify it, what would it look like?

   A lot of times we seem to overlook the idea of darkness. Sometimes we refuse to see it because we want to believe everything is okay. "Fake it till you make it." My Intro to Psychology teacher Misty Seybert used to always say. And in doing so we tend to become unaware of what exactly darkness is, and what it looks like. "To live without awareness of it at all is death pure and simple--even though one may still be walking around and smelling perfect." (Thomas Merton, quoted from Drakness, Question, Poetry, and Spiritual Hope by Paul Corrigan)

   Professor Corrigan also states that, "Darkness is a question that must be asked seriously." Implying that Darkness is of such a matter that firing off answers as if you have the right answer is nothing short of ignorance, and/or stupidity. At least in my own rendition of the thought anyway. I feel the same way; that when it come to something as serious as darkness, you need to ask yourself the right questions. Matthew 6:22-23 talks about darkness in respect to your heart. That if your eyes are a window to the soul then this means that they are what lets the light and or darkness in. Make sure that you are only letting in light, but what if the light that you thought was good is in fact darkness? (The question comes...) How great then is that greatness?

   Professor Corrigan brought up a truly valid issue; "Certainly we do not need to attend a funeral or travel to the other side of the world to find darkness. Downtown is as far as we ever need to go; and often, we can find it in our own bedroom." So then now the challenge becomes a matter of the heart, rather then just a matter of pure evil, death, and gloom. This is far more discouraging then the latter. For if it were simply a matter of pure evil, and certainty of death, then we would deal with it as we always have; ignored it. But because it's a matter of our own hearts now, we have been drawn to the dark-side. A force set out to destroy anything resembling that of hope. And the worst part is that we've been fighting this war against ourselves this whole time and never realized it until just now... when I told you. Corrigan also, as any good writer would do, insures a hope; stating that, "Facing darkness is not pleasant or socially acceptable, but in this world where darkness is, the integrity of our hope depends on it."

   The remarkable thing to me is that we tend to be that very source of evil, but are at the same time the only source of hope we have. It's when our hope rises up and chooses to say that, "Enough is enough. I'm tired of seeing people hungry. I'm sick of walking by people and not giving a care, just as long as I have money for the dollar menu at Micky D's. I'm done with changing the channel every time I see an ad for an orphanage in India. I'm done sitting around and doing nothing." It was ElieWiesel, a holocaust survivor, who said it best; "Indifference is the worst kind of hatred." So I direct my question now to our hope... When are you going to rise up? And when are we going to stop pretending that this darkness isn't in us?


   If this subject interested you and you want to see it in a more visual way, watch the movie Three. (It's also a book written by Ted Dekker.)