Sacred Waiting for the Light
We are nearing the deep Midwinter when all outer growth has stopped and the abundance of the harvest is over. It’s the time when humans in the pre-modern world celebrated the darkness as a natural and necessary balancing of the brighter and more fecund months of the Summer. Pre-modern people had no choice but to endure the dark months and to be naturally patient with the cycles of nature, to wait out the Winter and anticipate the return of the sun and the new growth of Spring. They understood Winter as integral to the natural cycles of Nature and to the archetypal pattern of Life itself. Before we lost touch with the inherent sacredness of Life people knew that the lengthy pause of Winter wasn’t an aberration, it was a time of sacred waiting, a welcome rest, and a knowing that unseen growth was going on underground. People knew the pause was meaningful – a necessary and sacred prelude to the return of the light.
Almost all the ancient religions developed sacred rituals that honoured the spiritual dimension of this darkness and recognised it as a time of sacred waiting while they anticipated the rebirth of the light. Solstice rituals at sacred sites such as Newgrange are among the oldest religious ceremonies celebrated in Ireland and much evidence of the practices still remains. In Judaism, Hanukkah is a midwinter festival of Lights celebrated at this time. Their prophet Isaiah prophesied the coming of the Light for all humanity, and in Christianity we celebrate the birth of the Light in the form of the divine child who brings a new way of being to the world. The ability to sit with the darkness is integral to Life but it’s a practice from which we have become estranged.
Psychologically, Carl Jung identified that our inner growth and transformation also depends upon a corresponding ability to pause and to sit with the way things are when life is stuck, broken, and in darkness. He called this process the ability to be with ‘the tension of opposites,’ pointing to the times in life when we are between two conflicting possibilities: between the darkness and the light, between good and bad, between suffering and joy. He saw that individuation or inner transformation absolutely depends upon our ability to live with the intense contradictions of life and our ability to wait rather than forcing a resolution. When we can pause in the same deep way that our ancestors and Indigenous peoples pause every winter, somehow, in a way that the rational mind cannot explain, a third way opens up. When we can endure the often unbearable tension of conflicting options in our lives, we allow deep inner and unseen growth and transformation to occur. We are telling the ego-self to take a backseat so that our True Self can come forward as the stronger, truer version of who we really are. We grow by enduring the pause. It’s what Eckhart Tolle calls ‘the power of Now.’
Jung saw that the natural pauses of life are natural periods when deep inner growth can occur. He recognised that when all outer growth is dead, when the vibrancy of life has deserted us and hope has vanished, that the darkness itself will produce an answer. He knew that when we can endure the often unbearable stasis of being between states in life that somehow 'a third thing’ is produced. He called it ‘a new attitude,’ something new is born in us that resolves the tension in a completely unexpected way. It’s a resolution that is born from the darkness and from the hopelessness itself and is not produced by our rational mind. Rather the very act of sitting in the pause allows a completely unknown and unexpected ‘third way’ to open up. It’s invariably a resolution that we could never have planned or orchestrated for ourselves. This psychological process mirrors the ancestors’ ability to endure the deep and dark Midwinter, neither trying to go backwards nor forwards, neither moving towards nor away from the opposing poles but patiently waiting for Nature and Life to reveal the Light in her own time and in her own way.
But in our hyper-fast, postmodern world in which we are disconnected from nature’s cycles and from our own natural cycles, and when we live with 24/7 light in a fast-food-fast-culture we often struggle to deal with darkness in its physical, psychological and spiritual forms. Sacred waiting is an opposite energy to the supersonic speed of the modern world yet, spiritually and mystically, Advent and midwinter are all about waiting. Not rushing the return of the light, not reaching for the quick fix of an ‘electrical switch’ but to let the dark times be times of hidden growth and inner transformation. Periods of pain, emptiness and hopelessness inevitably darken everybody’s life, often many times over, and we are not so skilled as our ancestors were with waiting out these dark times. Yet, precisely when we cannot see the way forward there is an invitation to stay in the darkness, to be in the pause, in the often frightening unknowing of how things will turn out and to accept that on our own we cannot find the way ahead.
John of the Cross in his mystical masterpiece, Dark Night of the Soul describes a 'night more lovely than the dawn.’ When we are at our most hopeless and lost, despairing of ever finding a resolution, when we are in our own deep Midwinter, if we can just let go our own efforts to fix things we’ll naturally surrender to a higher power that will help us. At our most broken and despairing, if we can just let go of our own efforts to find the way forward, we will naturally open to the possibility of a ‘third thing’ arising. Somehow, in ways that we cannot fathom or understand, the first glimmers of light emerge out of the darkness, the first rays of a rising sun appear, a divine child is born, and something new is given.
Image: ‘Now as the day is departing.’ Dante’s Comedia. Illustration by Gustav Doré.