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Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

David Whyte

Reflection

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

In How We Learn to Be Brave, Bishop Mariann quotes two lines of David Whyte's poem "Sweet Darkness". Those lines felt so powerful I had to read the rest of the poem.

One of the things that I have learned in dark nights ... of the soul, of depression, of anxiety, of whatever you might call it that has left me afraid and wondering about my place in the world and where faith fits into any and all of that, is that I have spent so much of my life making myself smaller. Seeking to fit in. To make my faith look like the church environment where I grew up. To be something other than the whole of who I am because I rarely felt like I belonged. 

It wasn't until I gave myself permission to discover who I really was, who God had created me to be, that I discovered a faith that was rich and deep. A faith that had space for all of who I am, in my queerness, in my questionning, in my uncertainty. A faith that has deep roots that finds community and refreshment even when I feel parched and dry. A faith that inspires me to keeping moving towards love lived fully and freely.

Ephesians 3:14-20 (NRSVUE)

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Photo by Tyler Domingue on Unsplash