Light, Darkly

Chasing sun is the only way I know

The cloudiest winter since 1963. We are hungry for the light.

Whenever I glimpse a sunbreak, I step outside and let my skin feel the forgotten warmth. 

Once I worked with a theologian who had moved to Minneapolis from California. I scoffed one day, despairing about the cold and dark, one of my favorite pastimes. “No,” she shook her head. “The light slants in your eyes sideways here, all winter long. It’s fabulous; I love it.”

When I walk in winter and the sun hits my sight slantwise, I remember her. Even and especially when the brightness blinds me for a brilliant minute, bouncing off fresh snow or sheer ice, I remind myself: we have light here, so much light.

Light can keep you going.

* * *

A cloudy blue picture of a snow-covered town on social media. The meteorologist celebrating in the caption: It finally happened! The northern town Utqiagvik, Alaska (formerly Barrow) saw the sun rise for the 1st time in 66 days today! Sun light was brief today. The sun came up around 1 pm and set at 2 pm. But it’s a start! They’ll go from 1 hour of daylight today to 3 hours of daylight next week!

Imagine light like that. None for weeks. Then only a hour. 

Where we live in Minnesota, our longest day stretches 15 hours and 36 minutes. Our shortest day shrinks to 8 hours and 45 minutes. From solstice to solstice, sunset shifts from 4:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. We learn to live with more, then we learn to live with less.

Imagine living like that. (You know.)

* * *

March’s sunlight holds my grief. 

Every year I forget it will do this to me, and every March I remember. The piercing light through bare branches, every tree empty. The sun’s angle past the bedroom window, hanging heavy at its height.

This year it is not yet time to mourn my daughters again. But in our winter-that-wasn’t, I am already unmoored by the light. February with no snow and fifty degrees, the grass greening, all the earth suspended in disbelief: how did you do this to us?

Every year on the anniversary of their deaths, I ask the same question.

* * *

Light comes through broken places, like blinds. Like crevasses, like cave mouths, like cracks, like Leonard Cohen lyrics. 

Once the words were spoken—Let there be light—and there was light. 

But not until the silence was shattered. 

* * *

It has been an empty Epiphany, an unlit Candlemas. 

My worn-out body is out of step with every rhythm: natural, liturgical, circadian. I cannot sleep the same after surgery and chemo, cannot rise early like I used to love, cannot sync my soul back into patterns and practices of prayer.

Be patient, a stranger chides on the Internet. Advice is the weakest offering, the palest light. 

I go through motions. They echo hollow, clattering in the dark.

* * *

Scripture shines like a beacon: clear, confident turns of phrase. “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12). “You are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14).

But every light in the world changes. The moon waxes and wanes. The sun rises and sets. The stars turn and disappear. Is divine light the same? Or is ours what dims?

Are we meant to receive the light or become it? Did we ever understand?

* * *

All the usual phrases fall flat. Dry season of prayer. Dark night of the soul. Instead what I feel pulses like a heartbeat, systole and diastole: the absence of presence and the presence of absence.

We cannot believe only in consolation or grasp tight to grace. Believing in the light, the beauty, or the comfort is not the same as trusting in the Source. But in a long stretch of slow healing, of readjusting to a changed body and reorienting to an unsteady future, it feels lonely and lost to wander without the Healer, the Creator who cared enough to make me. The Body whose body my body can no longer find.

* * *

When the light rises behind you, your shadow stretches long ahead. You can see yourself, or a figment of yourself, walking before you on the way. You walk into your own darkness, the via negativa. Your own shadow—by definition the lack of light—becomes your guide.

* * *

Driving behind a black Toyota, I saw the flash. 

Even through my grimy windshield, dusty inside and dirty outside, I caught the sunlight off the corner of their back window. A blinding instant, then gone; just the right moment for the reflection. From 93 million miles away, the light torpedoed through the universe and I saw it for a split second.

But it had been so long since sun shone that I kept the blinding burst in my mind’s eye all week. A tiny supernova from a shiny SUV.

Can whatever light we glimpse be enough to sustain?

* * *

Light sounds bright. A flash, a burst of excitement. Lumière rolls off the tongue, lingering like the long light of summer evenings. Lux is regal, commanding, powerful, stately: here to stay. Luz murmurs like a lullaby, whispering of dar a luz, to give birth. Luce rises and falls, a quick arc of the orb overhead, sunrise to sunset.

Only six languages here but so many shades. Imagine how many thousands of ways humans have to name what we share from one star.

* * *

While I write of light, the rare sun slips out from behind the gloom that has covered us for weeks. We are soul-hungry for its shining, the whole state of us. 

Light pools over me like melted gold, like liquid sun. Every dark, dry doubt vanishes for an instant. Of course the light was always there; any airplane ascent through storms teaches you how the sun is always above, even when hidden to everyone below.

Winter sunlight echoes anamnesis: an ancient Greek word, a meaty mouthful meaning “a calling to mind.” Theologians use the term to explain Eucharist. Catholics believe the sacrament is not simply a symbol, but by calling to mind the saving acts of God, we actually participate in Christ’s paschal mystery of dying and rising.

When we call to mind, we become part of what was and is and will be.

Suspended in snowless February, grief waxing and waning, prayer rising and falling, absence and presence beneath my skin, in my hollowed chest and haggard heart, I am calling everything to mind. 

I am chasing light, and it is the only way I know.

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For more…

On my daughters’ deaths. On Leonard Cohen. On Utqiagvik. On Epiphany. On Candlemas. On via negativa. On dar a luz. On anamnesis. On heartbeat.