Questions in the dark

What have you asked when the lights go down?

Someday will bring the last time
a small boy scurries into my lap,
scared from a big jump
at the movie theater
(even though he loves the movie),

but today will not be that day.

All 40-ish pounds of him,
flesh and bones I grew
inside my flesh and bones,
has tucked himself into
the curve of my chair
as if it were made for two
(as if I were made for two).

Is it the end?
He loud-whispers into my ear,
worried what’s happening,
the undoing of everything,
the shrinking of hope,
will last, will win.

Not yet, I promise. At the end
Everything will be restored.
Everyone will be saved.

How do you know?
He pushes back,
shoving small sneakers
against the seat in front of us,
rocking us gently
as we rocked a thousand times
in a well-worn chair
on a thousand nights like this.

Because good stories aren’t over
until everyone is saved, I tell him.

Everyone? He asks again.
Are you sure?

I’m not sure, I say. (I’m not.)
But I think so.
If everything hasn’t been restored
and everyone hasn’t been saved,
then it’s not the end.
I know that much is true.

How do you know? He presses
his small back into my chest.

Because I’ve read
enough good stories and seen
enough good movies
to know how they end.
(I am lying. I am also
telling the truth,
the only truth I know.)

We stay until the credits roll
because we know
there are always surprises
saved for the end.

Sure enough a voice booms
as the stars dance,
a timeless question
still spinning through space:
It touches the deepest
of human concerns: are we alone?

My small son answers back
to the echoing theatre,
shaking his head
still pressed to my face:
No!

Only then does he slip off my lap,
satisfied. We are still together.
The story is done. We are
not yet done.

---

What questions have you asked in the dark?

In Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, we use the language of “restoring the work” to mean putting materials back on the shelf in the same way you found them. CGS is a Montessori-based method of sharing faith with children, so its use of language—as in all Montessori environments—is intentional and deliberate. When I went through CGS formation, I was moved by this language of “restoring the work.” It not only honors the dignity of the child (i.e., these are not merely toys to be put away), but it also speaks to a deep theological truth, that God’s own work is restoration and we are called to participate in this holy labor: through forgiveness and reconciliation, through care for creation, through dignity and respect for the human person, through work for justice. One day we believe God will put the whole world to right, and we look ahead with joy to this ultimate restoration, even though it is far from here.

Over the years the language of restoring the work has settled into our home in ways I never expected. I love how it unearths a bedrock truth of what it means to be human: we long for restoration. As C.S. Lewis famously wrote, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” Deep within and without, we recognize the ruptures between the way things ought to be and the way they are. We yearn for goodness, justice, peace, and hope to be restored.

When a theologian-poet takes her children to Elio, she ought not be surprised that a Pixar movie on the cosmos would spark existential questions. But my answer to these poignant, probing questions from my littlest slipped out so quickly that only afterward did I catch how my reply to him meant something much deeper, speaking to the fears turning over and over in my own heart. I must admit that I bent the movie theatre’s rules and pulled out my phone as credits rolled to write down our exchange word for word so I wouldn’t lose it. (Apologies to no one because everyone else had already left; do people not know that Pixar movies always have a cookie at the end?!)

After the summer solstice, back to the darkening days of the year, during this dizzying, disorienting, disheartening time of political turmoil and societal upheaval, I wonder what questions we are asking in the dark. Not only the existential angst that many of us meet when we try to sleep, but each day’s wrestling with how to be human in an inhumane era. What does it mean to look for light in the growing dark and hope in days of despair? Summer whispers that sunlight is still plentiful; don’t dread winter darkness when it’s still months away. John the Baptist—whose feast falls in the time of solstice precisely because he must increase, I must decrease (John 3:30)—reminds us that every lonely voice of truth has felt they were crying out in the wilderness.

But still I wonder: how will everything wrong now be put to right? How will goodness be restored? How will love win? None of us know exactly, but we try to trust it could still happen. In the broken in-between, we need a thousand stories to help us imagine—and ten thousand questions to help us dig deeper. To find the light.

What questions are you asking in the dark? What do you hear in echoes or answers?