Beloved of God,

Daylight is growing more precious these days, as the time of the sun’s setting slips before 6pm and the sun’s angle continues its slow descent.  No more cycling after supper; no more evening walks at sunset.  One month ago the sun’s arc here rose to 39˚above the horizon; now its position is 29˚, halfway to the low point of 19˚ it will achieve on the winter solstice.  On November 7th, All Saints Sunday (and the end of daylight savings time), we’ll lose an hour’s light in one fell swoop.  It always feels like a descent to me, this movement into darkness, accentuated this year by the forecast of an El Niña winter, with plenty of lowland rain and mountain snow.  It was in large part for this reason that our gas fireplace was recently repaired.  When, in the wake of storms, the outages come, we’ll have a place of warmth to huddle around.

As a young man in Minnesota, I loved venturing out during the wildest storms Mother Nature could conjure.  Bundled in robust clothing, I trekked into the gaping maw of the beast, awed and exhilarated as the storm propelled me into the experience its dark fury.  After such a foray, returning to the light and warmth of home and hearth was a revelation.  Ah!  What grace!  What wonder!  What gratitude!  Little did I know that the vocation for which God was preparing me would lead me to traverse some of the most sublime and tortured territory of the human soul.

In his potent little book, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Life of Vocation, Parker Palmer writes:

Palmer has the Scriptures on his side.  One of the blessings of our faith tradition is the wisdom our spiritual ancestors expressed in not removing or sanitizing experiences of the dark side from the stories they preserved and passed on to us, but including them, so they can stand as markers for us as we, too, embark on this “journey toward joining the human race.” 

In the dwindling light of November we mark two feast days: All Saints Sunday, in which we recall the legacy of folks—some of whom we know—who kept the faith often through dark and turbulent times and often despite their own failures and misgivings; and Christ the King Sunday.  Ironically, the gospel text which founds our faith in Christ’s reign is the scene of Jesus’ crucifixion.  Suspended helplessly between heaven and earth, suffering, bleeding, suffocating; surrounded by mockers who can’t get enough of this comeuppance, Jesus is the antithesis of a king. Yet, even as hope vanishes and darkness descends, Jesus speaks “promise” to the shadowy criminal whose life, like his own, is about to meet an ignoble end.  “Today,” Jesus promises, “you will be with me in Paradise.” [Luke 22:43]

We don’t know much about the life of Jesus prior to his baptism and the beginning of his public ministry, but I can well imagine a young man who, like young people before him and since, had to come to terms with the “shadowy parts” of his life before he could come to that “center, full of light,” which was his true vocation. 

The One we worship as King did not count equality with God as something to be exploited but emptied himself, even to the point of death on a cross.  He has experienced human darkness in its fiercest forms.  Whatever shadows and dark places we have or will endure, we can be confident he has been there before us and will go there with us once again—to hell and back.  We do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in our hearts. 

Blessings on the way,

Pastor Erik