In Western Christianity, she said, all those things come together in a church that profited from slavery and has for centuries misrepresented holy peoples as white. It associates the language and imagery of whiteness with “virtuous things to be admired” and presents the language of darkness as “virtually always negative.”
“We are hearing in praying language, which is innocent, the ancient use of metaphors for light and dark and shadow. But we are hearing it in a world and in a church that is deep in white supremacy and often has the images of white supremacy on the wall,” she said.
That context changes the way those words are received and understood, perpetuating the evils of white supremacy and institutionalized racism, Gafney said.
“I think any and all spiritual symbols can be used for good or bad,” said the Rev. Steven Charleston, the former Episcopal bishop of Alaska and author of the book “Ladder to the Light.”
To Charleston, dark and light aren’t in competition but mutually interdependent. That’s what makes Advent’s message of light in the darkness so universal.
For many Indigenous peoples in North America, the dark winter months are a time of regeneration and rest, of “deep spiritual awareness” when sacred stories are shared that aren’t told at any other time of year, said Charleston, who is Choctaw.
The Rev. Steven Charleston, author of “Ladder to the Light.” Images courtesy of 1517 Media
Darkness is a place where new life is formed, he said. You cannot be born without darkness. You cannot take root. You cannot have light.
It’s not something to fear or to deny, but to embrace and live into, he said.
“The darkness, as we understood it over centuries, is a time that is full of the potential insight, wisdom and power of the sacred, so it becomes this really essential part of our whole spiritual cycle. It’s a season, just as we recognize Advent as a season,” Charleston said.
Positive imagery of darkness also can be found in Scripture.
Authors Sharei Green and Beckah Selnick point out a number of those images in familiar Bible stories in the picture book “God’s Holy Darkness,” published earlier this year. They name what they describe in the book as “the beauty and goodness and holiness of darkness and blackness and night.”
Selnick said the idea for the book came to her after reading a Living Lutheran column titled “God’s Beautiful Dark Works” by her mother, Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
