When I was small, I didn’t like the dark.
It wasn’t that I thought there were monsters lurking; it was a physical thing. I didn’t like the darkness of it, the thickness, the feeling of it closing around me. I didn’t like the unknown silence of it, the quietness into which my own heartbeat might come clamouring.
The dark seemed to me unutterably lonely and I would lie there blanketed in it, cut off and crushed by the weight of it. If it was to be dark, at least I wanted sound. I had a radio from a scout jumble sale that I listened to with an earpiece.
Frankly though, if it was to be dark, I wanted the landing light on.
These days the dark means other things to me. I’m not afraid of it but it weighs me down differently because now I’m older, and familiar with other sorts of darkness: grief and loss, pain fear and anger.
Now, whether or not we consider the current state of the world to be dark depends largely on our viewpoint. But it’s certainly the case that things look pretty murky and unknowable at the moment. There’s a fog around, and wherever you look it’s hard to see what might happen next.
Christians believe that God hates darkness too, but God isn’t afraid of it. In the Bible, the first thing that God does is turn on the lights. And in a remarkably modern twist, they’re voice activated. Let there be light.
And when God made light he saw that it was good. And it is.
In the light, we can see how beautiful we are. In the light, we cannot hide our intentions. In the light we see we are loved. Light grows confidence and light grows trust. Light draws us together because we can see further.
It’s hard to believe how much murkier things have become since I wrote this. But at the weekend, the statue of slave trader Edward Colston was pulled down, and over recent days the reign of darkness in the US has seemed a little less secure. The landing light is on.
The picture was taken last summer during a thunderstorm in Keyhole State Park WY.