Northwest UU Congregation
The Rev. Dr. Morris W. Hudgins
Jan. 22, 2012
Introduction
While I was working on my doctorate degree in Philadelphia in the early ‘80’s, I took a course at Temple University on Religious Autobiography. We read many classic religious autobiographies from Christian and Jewish literature–Augustine’s Confessions, Bunyans Pilgrim’s Progress and Elie Wiesel’s The Night, included. The professor said we needed to study a particular aspect of the struggles of historical figures focusing on the angst of their lives. I said I wanted to study the biographies of Unitarian Universalists. The professor said, “Boring.” I was taken aback. Why would she say this?
Unfortunately, my professor was mostly correct. Often times our predecessors overlooked the Dark Night, but spoke glowing of the morning. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal: “A depression of spirits, in a nation as well as in an individual, develops the germs of a plague.” Come on, Mr. Emerson, tell me about the Dark Night and not just the crimson dawn. When you mentioned your son’s death in your Journal you did not even mention your sadness. But Mr. Emerson also admits to the Dark Night when he writes:
What for the visions of the night? Our life is so safe and regular that we hardly know the emotion of terror. Neither public nor private violence, neither natural catastrophe, as earthquake, volcano, or deluge; nor the expectation of supernatural agents in the form of ghosts, or of purgatory and devils and hell fire, disturb the sleepy circulations of our blood in these calm, wall-spoken days. And yet dreams acquaint us with what the day omits. (p. 647)
Emerson knew about visions of the night, but we don’t see much of those visions in his Journals. He is too busy expounding his ideas about the beauty of nature, culture and civilization. Not much of the Dark Night.
So my challenge was to find Unitarian Universalists who struggled with life, as we all do, decisions to make, losses to work through, long sleepless nights, questioning relationships, vocation, should we stay in our job or move to a new one. Unitarian Universalists have angst like everyone else. In the course I took I found these moments of the Dark Night of the soul and wrote about them. I also turned to the poets that we all turn to and included them in my work. One of my favorite poets is Kahlil Gibran who wrote:
In the terrible silence of the night, as all heavenly things disappeared behind the grasping veil of thick clouds, I walked lonely and afraid in the Valley of the Phantoms of Death. (p. 330, A Treasury of Kahlil Gibran, “The Grave Digger”).
Many of us would like to forget the Dark Night—the ghosts and goblins in our minds and sometimes hearts. Others would like to blame the Dark Night on the Devil. But the Dark Night is real, and cannot be passed over easily nor blamed on some outside force.
What I want to say this morning is that we all experience the Dark Night. Let us be open to its message, even if it is haunting, look to our dreams and night- mares and find it within ourselves to wake up in the morning looking with hope to the future. Gibran writes:
Be silent, my heart, until Morn comes.
For he who awaits patiently the coming
Of dawn will be embraced longingly by
Morningtide. (p. 168-9)
Universalsim
A place where I found an openness in our history to the Dark Night is in the history of Universalism. Often times Universalists were brought up in an evangelical Calvinist church–to believe in eternal punishment and everlasting hell, especially for those who were not saved. In their preaching and in their writings they overcome those menacing days. So their Dark Night had to do with their wrong-doings. They wanted to find their worth and dignity, but were told about hell instead. They were brought up in very strict environments, taught to read scriptures daily, and to examine their souls. John Murray, the Founder of Universalism in America faced the torment and wrote about it in his autobiography. He wrote:
. . . My father rarely passed by an offence without marking it by such punishment as his sense of duty awarded; and when my tearful mother interceded for me, he would respond to her entreaties in the language of Solomon, “If thou beat him with a rod, he shall not die. The Bible was again introduced, and the day was closed by prayer. Sunday was a day much to be dreaded in our family. We were all awakened at early dawn, private devotions attended, breakfast hastily dismissed, shutters closed, no light but from the back part of the house, no noise could bring any part of the family to the window, not a syllable was uttered upon secular affairs. Every one who could read, children and domestics, had their allotted chapters. At last the bell summoned us to church, whither in solemn order we proceeded,–I close to my father, who admonished me to look straight forward, and not let my eyes wander after vanity. At church I was fixed at his elbow, compelled to kneel when he kneeled, to stand when he stood, to find the Psalm, Epistle, Gospel for the day, and any instance of inattention was vigilantly marked, and unrelentingly punished. (p. 29)
No wonder Murray later wrote to his new-found Universalist denomination:
Go out into the highways and by-ways. Give the people something of your new vision. You may possess a small light, but uncover it, let it shine. Use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. Give them not hell, but hope and courage; preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.
What Murray has shown us, confirmed by both Unitarians and Universalists, is that many of us grew up with eternal hell as a primary notion, heaven found only by a few. We do not want that to continue. Maybe in the process we have failed to face the Dark Night—that time in our lives when things were not all clear and beautiful as a spring day. There are times when we are tormented by our past, by our experiences of life, when we don’t have faith in ourselves or others, when we regret our actions, and our failures in life. It is all of this that makes up the Dark Night of the Soul. Loss and grief are part of it. Periods of loneliness and thoughts of suicide have even entered the minds of some.
Murray is one of our leaders who did face that period of angst, and made it through it. He lost his wife and child and was sent to debtors prison. He came to America to get away. He had lost his desire to preach. But this changed because others, specifically, Thomas Potter, a farmer in New Jersey, encouraged him to preach in his little chapel. That place is now remembered as Murray Grove on the coast of New Jersey. Murray went on to preach hope and courage for years to come, started a new denomination in this country, and went on to become its loved founder. Even after his deep loss and grief he was able to meet another woman and fall in love and marry her—the highly esteemed writer, Judith Sargent of Massachusetts.
Murray writes about his new found faith after the Dark Night:
I was lost in wonder, in love, and praise. I saw, as evidently as I could see any object visibly exhibited before me, that the good hand of God was in all these things. (. 210)
Where once he did not want to continue his profession of ministry Murray now decided to begin again. He wrote,
I will preach the glad tidings of salvation free as the light of heaven. The business thus arranged, I became reconciled to the will of the Almighty, and I commenced, with tolerable composure, another and very important stage of my various life. (p. 212)
Hope and Disconnection
We can move beyond the Dark Night caused by confusion, and a lack of direction in life. Hope can come to us through the encouragement of friends, a community of love and support. This is especially true in times of death. I have found inspiration from the poets who express their loss. One is the Indian poet Tagore who wrote in Gitanjali:
In desperate hope I go and search for her in all the corners of my room; I find her not. My house is small and what once has gone from it can never be regained. I have come to the brink of eternity from which nothing can vanish—no hope, no happiness, no vision of a face seen through tears. Oh, dip my emptied life into that ocean, plunge it into the deepest fullness. Let me for once feel that lost sweet tough in the allness of the universe. (Treasury, P. 306)
Tagore has expressed the essence of the Dark Night. We are alone, disconnected from the rest of the universe. We have no hope, no happiness and no vision for the future. This can also be true for organizations, especially churches. This is why creating a new vision periodically is important. A new vision, new hope can be found.
Inhumanity and the Dark Night
Another form of the Dark Night is the witnessing of horror in real life. We see it everyday on the news, but we don’t think of it as appearing before our very eyes. The memory of those events do not leave us. I have witnessed those events several times— the brutal killing of a family in Richmond while I was interim there, a robbery with a gun while I was candidating for a church in a Philadelphia suburb. I was living in the Bronx at the time, working at the United Nations while on sabbatical. Those memories of those events do not leave me.
There are the gross inhumanity to man and woman, and children—the Darkest Night of all. This the Dark Night that Unitarian Universalists can see. Then we can speak out and organize. This is what happened during the holocaust. The Unitarian Service Committee was born to help the victims. We continue to do this work.
When I first visited Transylvania I had the opportunity to visit the Concentration Camp at Dachau, but couldn’t. I couldn’t face the worst of the Dark Nights. On my second trip, however, I did. I visited a church member who was teaching in Lentz, Austria. From there we went to Maulthausen, a former Concentration Camp about thirty minutes away. It was interesting that many of the adults in the region don’t admit to its presence. Fortunately, the children in schools are taken there.
I found my visit a haunting experience—from the steep mine where many Jews died, to the showers where chemicals were released, and finally to the oven. What I will always remember is the eternal candle they put in the oven, so we will not forget what happened there and the thousands who died.
For many of us this Dark Night has caused a change in our faith—our faith in other people and a faith in a God that controls the universe. This is the loss of faith that Elie Wiesel experienced in the Concentration Camp. He wrote about it in The Night. His father was saying a prayer:
“May His Name be blessed and magnified” . . . whispered my father. The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank him for?
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget those things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never. (p. 32)
The Dark Night is sometimes caused by inner demons and sometimes demons from outside ourselves—experiences we would like to forget but cannot—child abuse, rape, incest, the witness of a violent death, or as Wiesel has written the mass murder of men, women and children, the ultimate holocaust. What Wiesel teaches us is that the Dark Night is sometimes caused and is forever living because of the silence of good people.
Conclusions
Most of us have never experienced such a dramatic and violent incident. But the Dark Night can also come in less dramatic ways, but still as heart wrenching: the loss of a job, the ending of a relationship, the loss of a loved one. It can lead to a loss in meaning and a desire to live.
What we need during these times of the Dark Night is new hope. The poet, Tagore, after suffering great loss, then realized that he again “won blessings in this life of the beautiful.” Where did he find it? “In the vessel of human affection” and “from the god of life.” (pp. 362-3)
As I look back upon the Christian biographies, I see those who experienced this hope through the example of Jesus, his love and his sacrifice. This is their choice. One such example was St. Therese of Lisieux who found ecstasy in the love of Jesus. He takes her to the depths of despair in the Dark Night then helps her fly into another realm. I have not experienced such ecstasy, but I have known the love of individuals who have helped me through the Dark Night. I firmly believe that whether we call it Jesus, God or human affection, it can take us out of the Dark Night.
It is this love we seek. For some it can come through a loving parent, a good friend, or a mate. Even with this help, we must also do the work ourselves, through continued efforts to fill the void, to make new friends, build new relationships, find new meaning, or that new job. Meaning is found through life itself not easy belief. No matter what the source, we all have the desire to receive a new enjoyment in life. I have a faith that it can always come. Like the night fell, so must the morning rise.
One of the purposes of a church is to provide friends, comrades, soul-mates who can help us through the dark nights—the loss of a job, the loss of a loved one, separation and divorce, a questioning of our purpose in life. I choose not to reject this life for another, but rather affirm that hope can return, morning can rise, meaning and purpose can be found. My prayer is that when you experience the Dark Night, you will find a community, a friend, a loved, who can help you through the soul searching, through the loss, into a new life ahead.
I would like to close with two poems by May Sarton, a person who faced depression much of her life. She knew the Dark Night. The first poem is titled,
“Over Troubled Water.” It is really a prayer:
I sit at my desk in a huge silence
Alone after the loud traffic in the will.
Buffeted by those troubling deep currents
That would not le me land or soul be still.
Dear God, help me to close my open eyes.
Help me to life up from the inmost place
A silence huge as that above wild skies,
As secret as your always absent Face.
Give me your darkness, your austere demand.
Strip me of every brilliant autumn leaf,
And lay the weight of reason in my hand.
Give me your darkness beyond hope or grief
Where the heartbeat itself cannot be heard,
God of creation, Oh huge silent Word!
The second poem is a kind of answer to the first. It is titled, “New Year Resolve”:
The time has come
To stop allowing the clutter
To clutter my mind
Like dirty snow,
Shove it off and find
Clear time, clear water.
Time for a change,
Let silence in like a cat
Who has sat at my door
Neither wild nor strange
Hoping for food from my store
And shivering on the mat.
Let silence in.
She will rarely speak or mew,
She will sleep on my bed
And all I have ever been
Either false or true
Will live again in my head.
For it is now or not
As old age silts the stream
To shove away the clutter,
To untie every knot,
To take the time to dream,
To come back to still water.
Yes, May Sarton knew the Dark Night. She also found time to “take time to dream” and “come back to still water.” May it be so for each and every one of us.