Sermons

Preacher: Rev. Dr. Duncan Newcomer

“On what is the spiritual response to darkness, and what is darkness?”

The three purposes of a spiritual life are to shine out in the midst of surrounding darkness, to see the darkness without becoming dark, and to get out of the darkness in order to light it up.

We are to shine when it is dark, we are to see the dark without being dark, and we are to turn our light on the dark to make it go away.

Darkness, evil, in all the world’s great religions, is assumed to be part of the creation, and all religions, in one way or another, call upon humanity to identify with the light, with goodness.

We are to shine out, look around, and beam back. These three.

This is one trinity even Unitarians can accept.

It is what a light house does: it shines out into the darkness; it does not go dark; and it shines back onto land until the sun rises.

Spiritual life offers a deeper view than the cycles of optimism and pessimism found in philosophies and in political life. Deeper and more personal.

One of the things we can like about the Harry Potter series is its ability to grapple with the forces of darkness, as a force and not just an R-rated moment.

Dark is a dark-ness. Evil is bigger and more vague than ten broken Commandments. Evil is not the rules you break but the role you don’t play. It is a vague emptiness that allows predictable evils.

The forces of darkness become impersonal, like violence, greed, and cynicism; cruelty, brutality and selfishness. This emptiness is a spiritual atmosphere that sucks individuals in and even as they speak their dark words they seem strangely impersonal.

This “ness” of darkness robs individuals of their personal and unique selves. All evil people begin to be like each other, become a type. That is why Charles Dickens was so good at portraying them.

Unlike darkness light is particular, creative, ingenious, new and individual. People who live in the light become creative in unique ways, become individual characters.

One reason liberal democracy is good spiritually is that it allows for more human individual uniqueness than does totalitarian uniformity. There is no such thing as a mass-produced individual, a group person. The goodness and authenticity of someone like Lincoln is because of his extreme individuality. One great writer recently wrote that he picked Lincoln because Lincoln was the most interesting person he had ever known of. Lincoln is interesting because he is unique, paradoxical, and complex in numberless ways.

Uniformity breeds the lifelessness that allows for evil to arise. In the dark everything gets lost and becomes all one. In the light things begin to stand out and creativity has room to make something new, even something beautiful. There is nothing beautiful when it is all dark.

John Steinbeck writes in his memoir, “Travels with Charley” of his astonishment at the beauty of Wisconsin, a place he felt he knew from pictures.

But he writes, “Why then was I unprepared for the beauty of this region, for its variety of field and hill, forest, lake?… I saw it for the first and only time in early October, the air was rich with butter-colored sunlight, not fuzzy but crisp and clear so that every frost-grey tree was set off, the rising hills were not compounded, but alone and separate. There was a penetration of the light into solid substance so that I seemed to see into things, deep in, and I’ve seen that kind of light elsewhere only in Greece…. It was a magic day. The land dripped with richness, the fat cows and pigs gleaming against green, and, in the smaller holdings, corn standing in little tents as corn should, and pumpkins all about.” (p. 97)

In light, things are distinct. To find yourself is to find the light that reveals you as you are. The reason the light is good is because the things in creation stand out.

Reinhold Niebuhr, the great 20th century theologian said that original sin is not so much a taint written in human nature as it is a godliness written out of it. Humans, he wrote, commit evil not basically through a presence of evil but through an absence of good. We are pulled, sucked, into sin by a vacuum of an absent good. We fall into sin we are not pushed. All evil needs is for individuals to stop being good. Then the vacuum sucks us in and we end up doing things that do not feel like who we really are—but it is who we, en mass, have become.

Every corrupt business man in the Enron scandal had a reason to say it was not bad what he had done, it was just what people were doing, how it was done, it was the atmosphere, the uniform behavioral pattern. No one stood out and said, this is dark, and I did it, even in the dark. And so individually none of them felt guilty because they had already lost their individuality. It was not really them, you see, who had done all these things.

Nazi German war criminal made the same plea. “I was only doing what WE were told to do. It was not me is was ‘we’ and it was ‘them.’”

There is an example of the emptiness of evil that haunts me. One of the airline check-in people at Boston’s Logan airport reported that on the morning of nine-eleven, as she checked-in the eventual terrorist hijackers she said that the leader had the emptiest most deadened eyes she had ever seen in her life. Of course they were without light, he was lost in dehumanized evil darkness.

The appalling appeal of mass killings is that the killers still are trying to put an individual stamp on their actions, they are trying to stand out as individuals, to make a name for themselves. Their addiction to the news coverage of their acts, their, shall we call it “lack of modest anonymity,” is because they want the fame of their numbers. Even the glory of the suicide bomber is that he is promised a unique personal heavenly reward. He won’t be lost in a crowd in heaven, he is told.

And like any addiction the numbers have to keep going up in order to get the sense of self that is actually impossible to achieve in the slavery of evil. There is no freedom and no self in the dark. To define the dark just ask: where is the freedom and where is the self in this? If it’s not there, then it’s dark and evil.

So it is that light and personal life go together, and finding the light is the great spiritual calling. Finding your own personal self is the only way it can be fulfilled. To paraphrase the great 18th century theologian Jonathan Edwards: The purpose of life is to have a passion for a divine and supernatural light and to have a passion for your own joy in that light, AND to realize that those are one and the same passions.

On what is apocalyptic darkness and what should we make of it?

Let us not be afraid to look at the dark and apocalyptic world and worldviews that have surfaced in our political season. Whether it is in random police killings, either of police or by police, or fear mongered political rhetoric, or actual terrorist events and threats, we have a theme here that is beyond the normal scope of Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” versus Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America.” I taught a course on apocalyptic literature at the Loomis Chaffee School in the 1970’s. We wanted our students to be ready and able to live in the world that is run by both the Children of Light AND the Children of Darkness.

The children of Darkness are, as defined by Reinhold Niebuhr, ruthless, cynical, corrupt and anti-democratic. What makes such people participants in evil is not the limitations that darkness imposes on them, such as social inequality and economic displacement, or just ignorance, but rather their responses to those limits. How we reach out to change our world is where morality comes in to play. Being the victim of some social wrong does not make what you do virtuous. Whether you are on a Trumpian rant and rage or a vigilante murder of a cop or by a cop, what makes you dark is not why you are doing what you are doing but what it is you are actually doing.

There are, of course economic and social forces driving the movements. But we are not and cannot be responsible FOR the forces of darkness. We can and must be personally responsible for holding the light, shining the light—and even believing in the coming light. As spiritual people we are responsible for the light in the world, and for acting with it and for it.

The strange thing about dark evil is how vague and empty it is. It is like a reckless random black hole. It is impossibly vague. Crafty is a word used often for the shape shifting aspect of dark evil. A theologian at Yale recently reminded me also of how limitless is the energy of the flat an unimaginative forms evil can take. Jonathan Edwards thought that the boring replica of criminal behavior proved the existence of the Devil. It all came from the one big idea –murderous rage, from Cain to ISIS, real Johnny one-notes. Violent murder seems to be its masterpiece.

While it enslaves its participants, it escapes its opponents, often and easily. The evil in Tolkien’s “Lord of The Rings” enters us as “wraiths” or “Ringwraiths” who are “just like mist or smoke, both physical and, even dangerous and chocking, but at the same time effectively intangible.” (p. 124, “Tolkien” Tom Shipley) The trouble here is that evil becomes more than just the absence of good because it seems to seep into our lungs as smoky pride in even our own virtuous causes. This smoky airy swiftly moving half-form can become a great rhetorical skill in the hands of some politicians. Evil is certainly the self-will to absolute power of our own impulses, toward piety, justice, knowledge or in trying to save some place, even a country. Of course evil never feels like evil to the evil doer.

As vague as dark-evil is, light-good is exactly the opposite in its concreteness. Light and goodness are personal and individual attributes and actions—even as they join in movements, they express both reason and heart and come into being with special actions and plans. Of course evil eventually has plans too. The Holocaust and the concentration camps were an action plan, but they had no reason to them. The Jews never were the cause of Germany’s problems. That was the original projection of evil onto The Other that people in the dark do. And of course it was a heartless plan.

Light and good eventually become social forces of their own, but they are made up in the light of reason and with the passion of an enlightened heart. And they lose the purity of goodness as they become enacted group plans. Accepting that is the key to democracy. Otherwise totalitarian religious states take over and try to be the bringer of all goodness and perfection whether it is the communism of Lenin in the 1920’s or the distortion of Islam by ISIS in the beginning of this century.

On the goodness of being in the light.

It seems that people who enter the struggle of light over darkness also seem to become the most optimistic. Several times I have been startled to hear Senator George Mitchell talk of his grand vision of the future of America and it’s positive impact on the world. And recently we have heard others who have devoted their political life to the causes of progress and light who were also filled with that light themselves. How good it is that when you help the world that helps your world view.

People who preach and teach and speak only about darkness seem to become dark themselves. Detached people, self-interested people, seem to think that their ability to see the dark side makes it and them larger and more real or the only truth.

Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that the Children of Darkness are cynical, narrowly self-focused, and too much in love with their own power. The Children of Light are naïve, enamored of their innocence, their assumption to bringing about a world of good without the dirty hands of power and are enamored with their own goodness.

The Children of Light love justice, and because of the human capacity for justice Democracy is possible. The Children of Darkness love self and self-interest. Because there is the human capacity for injustice, Democracy is necessary, so wrote Niebuhr.

And so the genius of the spiritual world view is to see how darkness really does exist, is the occasion for light, and that light is our role.

The additional critique of religions is for us never to be too sure which side we are on, whose Child we really are, despite ourselves and our best intentions. For as in the American Civil War, as Lincoln said, both sides read the same scriptures, prayed to the same God.

It is up to us individually to see the darkness that we are in, to not become darkened by what we see, to shine out of that darkness, to light the world—together—as the supernatural divine light rises, as it does, each morning.

Let it be so.