“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”
- “To Know the Dark,” by Wendell Berry
You don’t know what you don’t know. And so we, too: we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We have come to know a lot. Think of the new and painful things that you (we) have been through, recently—tick each one off in your mind; feel each prick.
I just taught my Judaism Class about Tishah be-Av, the one day a year set aside to lament everything that needs lamenting, from biblical times to today. It is the one day when we go to the dark places in human experience, and we go there, quite intentionally, without a light. We give the dark its due, so that we can live the other 364 days with less shadow.
What lessons have we learned from our most recent “dark” experiences? Our eyes have had time to become accustomed to the dark; what feet and wings have we discovered there, at the heart of it? I told my students: if nothing else, there is always, always, something to be learned from the dark times; and if we don’t learn it, we will have wasted a lot of pain and sorrow.
-- The Rev. Barbara Talcott, St. Mark’s School
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