When Darkness is My Closest Friend

The Recovery Worship team helped plan and lead the Longest Night Service at LaSalle on Dec. 20th. Here is the meditation that I gave as a part of that service. --Larry

Merry Christmas! Christmas is that time of the year when you are told how you are supposed to feel. Let me prove my point. I’ll sing a few words from a popular Christmas song, and I want you to sing the rest of the line.

Ready?

Here’s the first one:

“Tis ths season to be ….. (jolly)”

Got the idea? Okay, here are some more:

“Have yourself a …. (merry little Christmas, let your hearts be light)”

“Have a holly …. (jolly Christmas)”

“It’s the most …. (wonderful time of the year)”

“You better watch out, you better not …. (pout, you better not cry)”

This is a time when we are told we’re supposed to be happy, jolly even. And we should be careful not to cry because it might lighten the load of gifts that we are about to receive. But because it is also an event that happens every year with a lot of celebration, it can be a time when we are reminded of losses we have faced over the years, or of things that we never had and lost out on. We can feel out of place in the midst of all the celebrating, as those losses hang like stones on our hearts.

The Longest Night

This longest night service is a time when we recognize losses over the past year, or losses that we are feeling now that may have happened many years ago. On the day with the least amount of light and the greatest darkness, we recognize the darkness that we face in our own lives.

Now this is not something that many churches celebrate. Modern Christianity often gives little place for darkness, loss and grief. At least that is what I learned growing up. My parents modeled for me two ways of dealing with sadness and pain. When my mom felt sad, we would see her begin to tear up and then she would head off to her room. However she dealt with it we never really saw, because she did it on her own in private. My dad, on the other hand, refused to recognize that he had been hurt. Anytime something bad happened to him, he would always try to take some positive lessons from it and move on. He tended to skip over pain and hurt so that he could look on the bright side of life. That characteristic has a lot of strength to it, but it did leave me without an example of what to do when I felt pain and hurt and no positive spin could make it go away.

Did any of you experience similar examples from your parent? What were the messages that you got about expressing sadness and pain?

For me the messages were:

“Pain is for sissies.”

“When you think of all the good things God has done for you, why should you be sad?”

“There are other people who have it much worse than you do. You should be grateful for what you have.”

The Art of Lament

Yet look again at the verses we read together. This is not how the people who wrote the Bible deal with their pain and sadness. They let it all out. In fact, they are quite creative and descriptive about their hurt, their sadness and their loneliness. In the verses we read together, what are the lines that resonate for you?

Here are some that struck me:

“When I think of God I sigh; When I meditate I feel discouraged.” Psalm 77:3

"I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax …” Psalm 22:14

“He has broken my teeth with gravel; he has trampled me in the dust.” Lamentation 3:16

“Your wrath has swept over me; your terrors have destroyed me…. The darkness is my closest friend.” Psalm 88:16 – 18

The Season of Dreaming

In the Bible passages normally read at this time of year we hear a lot about dreams. I had my own dream recently that I took as a warning about what happens when I am not willing to face my grief and pain.

The dream started with our old Dodge Neon parked on our enclosed back porch. I don’t know how or why it got there, but I did know I had to move it off the porch and into the drive. I tried to back it up and drive it down the steps (it seemed like a rational thing to do in the dream). In the process I reversed too fast and ended up driving the car through the back wall of the house. The car fell onto the fence and then onto the sidewalk, busting the oil pan and spilling oil all over the place.

I thought, “Oh no, I don’t have enough money in the account to pay for repairs on the car.” Then I thought, “Oh, and the porch too. I just wrecked the wall of the porch.” I looked up at the house and saw that not only had the porch wall come down, but the entire south wall of the house was gone as well. I could look right into our living room and bedrooms.

I went back into the house and found a lot more damage. Pipes were broken, the electricity was disconnected and the heating system did not work. As I went through the house I found two other families from the church living with us. As I talked with them I realized that nine years had passed, that most of the country was living together this way in broken down homes, and that I had no memory of what had happened in the previous nine years.

I finally asked one of the people living with us “What happened with Barack Obama? Did his administration go this bad?” Their response was, “No, he did really well. We would be much worse off if he hadn’t been President.”

It was about this time that I woke up. My wife and I spent some time trying to figure out this dream later in the day. I came to see it as a warning. Over the past few months I have felt an underlying sadness. Especially at this time of the year I reminded of the place I used to work for 23 years, and the friends that I miss from that place. Rather than facing the sadness directly, I was finding ways to avoid it. I would stay up late watching TV and having one or two glasses of wine, trying to get good and numb before I went to bed. For me the dream seemed to be saying that if I continued in this way I could let a lot of years go by without noticing them pass. I could escape the feelings, but I would also not be present for what was happening around me. And in the process a lot of things could be going wrong and getting worse, and I wouldn’t notice.

Facing Darkness

Instead of hiding from the darkness, I needed to face it. I was reminded of another story about a dream that I had read a while ago in a book by Jerry Sittser. In A Grace Disguised Jerry writes about a family outing that took them many miles from home. On the way back, a drunk driver hit their car, and Jerry’s mother, wife and daughter were killed. For two years Jerry went through the motions of work and trying to raise his three remaining children. But he remained numb, unable to feel the grief and pain of his loss. Then one night he had a dream. He was trying to outrace the sun. As the sun began to set in the western sky, he ran towards it, trying desperately to stay in its light and warmth. But he could not keep up, the sun kept on setting. Then he heard his sister speaking to him in the dream. She told him “You never outrun the sun. All you are doing is prolonging the darkness. You need to turn the other way, to the east. If you run toward the darkness, you will soon see the rising sun.”

I needed to accept the darkness I was sensing around me, to feel the pain over my loss. For me this is a complicated pain. I resigned from my old job, where I had a senior role and was well respected, because the ways I had learned to cope with it were destroying me and my family. I had found ways to deal with the stress and travel of my job that were not healthy, but were addictive and destructive. I had to leave to focus on my own recovery.

After resigning I focused first on getting a new job, which God provided rather quickly. But now I am realizing that I don’t like this job, or the people I work with, nearly as much. Every time we have a conference call or an email exchange I am reminded of what I have lost.

With the pain I also feel shame. It was my failure, my self destructive patterns that led to my resignation. Had God given me the desires of my heart, and I blew it, so now I am being punished? I understand how the people who wrote the laments we read felt when they asked similar questions.

The laments show me how to do this. I can publicly express my grief, my shame, my failure, and my anger at God. I can know in this that I am powerless to change the patterns of behavior that led me to this point. And I know, as the song that Gary sang says, that God has led me to this point.

We celebrate the longest night as a way of remembering that even the longest night has an end. The first rays of dawn always come after the darkest point of the night. We can do nothing to make the sun rise sooner. But we can know that in expressing our pain, our anger, our fear to God that we are also expressing our faith that the God of light can shine on us again.

Sharing Loss, Receiving Assurance

The next part of our service gives you a chance to respond, a chance to express your own pain or the feelings of loss that you may be carrying with you into this holiday season. We have set this up as a kind of a journey. You will start at this side of the room, by picking out a candle from the basket. You can light it here in the middle and then tell us about the pain, or loss, or a prayer request that you might have for us, knowing that you are in a community that can hold these things with you.

For example, I am experiencing the loss of a job that I loved, and some of the relationships that went with it, and the dreams I had for myself. I am also experiencing the loss of my mother, who has not been physically present with us for the last 12 Christmases.

Then you place the candle in the sand pit and leave it there. This shows how when we can express our pain in the company of a loving community, it never goes away entirely, but we do allow others to share and carry it with us.

Then you come to this side of the room and pick out a verse of assurance from this basket. Slide the bow off the paper and then read the verse to us. This is the assurance God has for me this evening:

Micah 7:7-8

But as for me, I will look to the Lord, I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me.

Do not rejoice over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me.

Where’s the Miracle?

By Lenora Rand, for the December Recovery Worship Service


“It so happened that as Zachariah was carrying out his priestly duties before God, working the shift assigned to his regiment, it came his one turn in life to enter the sanctuary of God and burn incense… Unannounced, an angel of God appeared just to the right of the altar of incense. Zachariah was paralyzed in fear.But the angel reassured him, "Don't fear, Zachariah. Your prayer has been heard. Elizabeth, your wife, will bear a son by you.”
--Luke 1:8-13


I make my living in advertising, as a creative director. But truth be told, writing--song lyrics and short stories, theater pieces, screen plays, novels and creative non-fiction—that’s what I really love. So while I’ve done a certain kind of writing throughout my advertising career, it hasn’t been that fulfilling to me. And while advertising has paid the bills, all my life I’ve also been writing in my spare time—the stuff I really enjoy. But as much as I’ve always wanted to sell a novel or screenplay or a non-fiction book, I haven’t. As much as I want to get paid for doing what I really love, I never have. And most of the time I just deal with it, but as you can probably imagine, it doesn’t always feel so good.

A couple weeks ago, a good friend of mine, we’ll call him Sam, who also has a corporate job and writes “for fun” on the side, got some very positive news about his writing. He’d recently made a trip to LA and while there he made some good contacts for both screenwriting and songwriting and ended up with a few very important, famous, successful type people interested in seeing more of his work. When he told me about this over lunch one day I said “Oohs and aahs” at all the right times. I told him how happy I was for him. Multiple times. I smiled until I thought my mouth was going to fall off. I even offered to help him punch up one of his scripts. And then I promptly went home and ate about half my weight in Doritos nacho flavored tortilla chips. Why? Because it’s my addiction, it’s what I do to numb the pain and to take away the feeling that THERE ISN'T ENOUGH TO GO AROUND. In that moment it seemed like stuffing myself was the only way I could stuff back down this feeling of being ripped off and cheated, it was the only way I could get through the anger and resentment I was feeling toward everyone, including God. All I could think in that moment was that Sam is going to become this huge success doing what I love to do and I'm going to do nothing and get nowhere. And never in my life will I get what I really want.

When you read the gospel of Luke, you find a lot of miraculous events surrounding the birth of Jesus. The first of them happens with the birth of the child of Elizabeth and Zachariah, John the Baptist, the prophet who came before Jesus to preach and prepare the people’s hearts for Jesus’ message.

Elizabeth, and her husband, the priest Zachariah, had been wanting to have a baby for a long time. But it hadn’t happened for them. I can certainly imagine what that feels like. Can’t you? Can’t you imagine how sick with disappointment they were every month when Elizabeth didn’t get pregnant? How deeply jealous they felt when friends got pregnant easily—friends who practically just exchanged a romantic glance across the room and were suddenly “with child”—while they tried and tried, did all the right things, kept trying, and still nothing.

Even if you haven’t gone through this with a pregnancy, I suspect you know what it’s like to desperately wish for something that doesn’t seem to ever happen for you. While it seems to happen easily for others. Maybe like me, you have a dream of work that is actually fulfilling and enlivening to you. Maybe you wish for healthier relationships with family members. Maybe you pray for an end to physical illness. Or an easier sobriety. Or serenity. Or a deeper experience of God’s love. But for some reason, it doesn’t seem to be happening. But we can name ten people it is happening for, no problem. Maybe you want recognition at work. But your coworker seems to get it all. Or you want kids who like to be with you and enjoy talking to you and who shower regularly and with gusto. But the size 4, Lycra-work-out-leggings-wearing neighbor gets those kinds of kids, not you.

I don’t know about you but I believe in miracles…miracles that seem to fall into the laps of everyone but me.

But in the scripture we read today, Zachariah finally gets his miracle. An angel shows up while he’s at work, full of good news for him. What he and Elizabeth have wanted and wished for and prayed for all these years is finally going to happen. Cool, huh?

Zachariah doesn’t start jumping up and down too soon though. He’s like the congresswoman who got a call from president elect Barack Obama this week congratulating her on her re-election, and she hung up on him—twice—thinking it was a hoax. Zachariah seemed to be feeling the same thing. Was he getting punked by an angel?

It was hard for him to believe, I think, because he was just tired of hoping, and maybe in his exhaustion his vision was clouded, clouded by daily life, by business as usual. That’s how I feel too often, I admit. Here we are in this season of hope and joy and angel voices and it’s hard to see much except the lists of things I need to do, the work I need to finish, the dirty dishes in the sink and the bad traffic on the snowy highway. If there are miracles around me, if they want my attention, they better get in line. If you’re going to give me a sign, it better be neon and flashing, and maybe slap me upside the head. Zachariah’s got the angel Gabriel standing right in front of him and even he asks for a sign. And Gabriel says, Hello. I’m Gabriel. I sit next to God. What more do you need? Maybe that’s why Gabriel puts Zachariah into a cone of silence for a while. He forces him to do as the Psalmist says, Be still and know that I am God. Be still and pay attention. Be still and be grateful for the miracles that are all around you. All the time.

I think another reason Zachariah had a hard time taking in the miracle that was being offered to him was that it didn’t look the way he expected. When the angel gave him the news he practically said, Are you kidding me? After all this time? I was expecting this 20 years ago not now, not like this.

I can relate to that too. About 10 years ago I went through a very bad time in my career. I got a new boss who I couldn’t “relate to very well.” He didn’t seem to like me either and he did some very nasty things behind my back and essentially took me off an account that I’d been managing quite successfully for a long time and gave it to some other guy who he liked more. And then while he didn’t take away my title, he gave me the choice of reporting to this guy (which in essence was a demotion) or leaving the company. I think his exact words were “Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.” I began to lovingly refer to this boss as Satan, not to his face, of course, and I was really strongly thinking about heading out that door. But financially it would have been insane at the time…so I felt stuck, and unsure what to do.

I’d been in recovery a while, and I’d been learning about asking for help…not my strong suit, but I decided to give it a try. I prayed about it, I prayed for the miracle I knew I needed and finally decided to call one of the other big wigs in our agency, we’ll call him Bill, someone I’d reported to only briefly in my career, who was now actually one of the top execs in the company. Bill was higher up on the food chain than my boss, Satan, and I thought maybe Bill would see what an idiot my boss was being and fix everything for me. Get me what I wanted, which was my position and my account back. So I went to Bill’s office. Bill, you should know, was truly a crazy man—hugely overweight, full of barely controlled rage, mercurial on the best of days—but basically he and I hadn’t had any major run ins when I reported to him, and I knew he hated my boss, so I was hopeful he’d take my side.

As I walked into Bill’s office, he got up from behind his desk and started walking toward me. I thought he was coming over to give me a hug. I don’t know why I thought this. He’d never hugged me before. But I fell into his arms and just started crying. I cried and cried and crazy Bill just stood there and patted me on the back. When I calmed down a little, he guided me over to the sitting area in his office and we sat on his couches and talked a while about the situation. Then he asked me if I had a family. I said yes. And he said, “And they love you? And you love them?” I said yes. He said, “You are very lucky. There are many, many people who can’t say that.” And I knew he was speaking of himself. He counseled me that day to keep the job in perspective. He told me I’d always been a team player and to keep being a team player and everything would be all right.

When I left his office I felt much better. I remembered these lines from a D.H. Lawrence poem:

What is the knocking? 
What is the knocking at the door in the night? 

It's somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels. 
Admit them, admit them.

And I also realized, suddenly, that when my strange angel Bill had started walking toward me when I came in the door, he’d had no intention whatsoever of hugging me. He was simply heading over to sit down on the couches on the other side of the room.

But I got a miracle that day. It wasn’t the one I wanted or expected. But it was the miracle I needed. I followed his advice and I ended up with a better job. I also ended up learning and growing tremendously from the devil boss who turned out to be another strange angel himself.

I was looking at the 12 promises from the Big Book the other day and I was thinking about what a list that is. What miracles would have to occur to see this list fulfilled in my own life:

We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.
We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.
We will comprehend the word serenity.
We will know peace.
No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.
That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.
We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.
Self-seeking will slip away.
Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change.
Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us.
We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.
We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.


Wow. Hard to believe I’d ever get all that. As hard to believe as a very old barren woman and a crotchety old man having a baby.

I love what it says in the Big Book at the end of this list:
Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us - sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.

I don’t know what miracles you’re looking for. Hoping for. What miracles you desperately need in your life. But just for today, I can tell you this. They are being fulfilled among us - sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.

Maybe to see that, we just need to be still, be quiet, pay attention and open our eyes to the strange angels.

And I’m also learning to listen to these words, straight from the mouth of the angel Gabriel: Do not be afraid. Your prayer has been heard.