The stain glass windows that grace the cathedral of my home church are stunning. The cobalt blues and brilliant colors shine like jewels on a sunny day. Images jump out and stories unfold with each shift of daylight. Without this light, without the sun to display their brilliance, they stand, darkened, in quiet witness to the faith-life they portray.
The beauty and sacred wisdom within each of us are much like these windows – hidden, silent at first, waiting to be revealed by the light of our spiritual awakening. Like stain glass, this hidden wisdom, this inner beauty, can’t be ours without the light of awareness, but they are there, waiting for the right exposure. Otherwise, they remain in the dark.
This is what I call the positive dark, the unknown of us, the pregnant source within that reveals to us our true being. This dark is that part of us that goes through the fire of ordeal in order to allow the light within us to shine on our experience and reveal in it what we came to this place to learn; in order to release our inner wisdom, the eternal spark within that informs our lives.
Those experiences that throw us into the dark — our struggles, our failures — hold the new energy, the new revelation. Naturally, we don’t want to go through the dark, the fire. It’s hard to embrace the dark from an ego position. We see this as our having to give up that part of us that keeps us grounded in the only things we’ve known up to now. It’s only when we begin to see from a soul position that we can recognize the new ground of our becoming – who we are becoming because of our ordeal — as holy ground, as positive in a spiritual sense.
The more we go through our dark moments with this awareness that there is wisdom hidden in them, clues that reveal our way through the forest, the more light we shine on these dark places. We realize that going through the fire is the only way we get the wisdom, the sacred beauty within. This helps us more easily tolerate the anxiety these experiences bring. We can more consciously surrender to the fire that transforms.
We only learn to love the dark when we can shine a light on it and see traces of ourselves as already transformed, as already having the wisdom because of our dark experience. It’s as if we already see ourselves on the other side. Our dark experience doesn’t go away when the light of consciousness shines on it. The pain, the struggle is still present. The light only makes them more prominent, more potent, more rich, so we can move through them.
Stain glass windows sparkle and reveal their beauty in the light; they don’t cease to exist in the dark. Our dark experience – the death of someone close, a lost job, hardship that causes a deep wound – doesn’t necessarily change when we shine light on it. We still have to use every ounce of wisdom and trust we have gained till now to get us through. But, we know from experience that a revelation is at hand, that the resource we need is already within.
The positive dark contains the beauty and the love and the creativity that is hidden in us, those unknown parts of us that release the new energy. The positive dark holds that new deck of cards within us from which we can draw a new hand, a new potential, a new way of being in the world. To the world, our having gone through the fire leaves us looking bruised and blackened. What the world views as ugly is indeed our best hope.
Like the Black Madonna who graces that famous temple of medieval stain glass — Chartes Cathedral – we are blackened by the fire in order to return to our virginal state, ready to give new life to what is precious within us. The dark experience strips away all that detours us from our virginal Yes. The consciousness that emerges from our having endured the flames vaults us into a way of being only our inner wisdom could have imagined.
In the positive dark of our wounding experience, our wisdom, our potential, our fullness waits. It waits for the light of consciousness to shine on it and reveal its treasure. This happens when light and dark come together in fruitful intercourse. This happens in us when we discover in the dark the light that is hidden there, waiting, revealing, releasing something in us that matches our longing.
Unlike the negative dark that feeds on addiction and suicidal ideation, the positive dark that houses our inner treasure does no harm to our essential self. It just waits for the light to reveal it, for us to become conscious of its presence in us. The negative dark – addiction, war, genocide, violence – thrives on destructive energy even in the dark and cries out to be activated in the tormented soul.
Like Jacob fighting with his angel till morning light, we have to fight any negative darkness in us until we can drag it, kicking and screaming, into the energy of our positive dark. There is more light accessible here. We can transform the negative, destructive energy with the light of our conscious intent, by hard work, by the wisdom we have gained from our work in our positive dark.
The dark is not final. It waits for the light. Allowing the light to shine on it and through it and from within it lights up our soul like a stain glass window on a lovely autumn day. Learning to love the dark is taking the pieces of our brokenness and creating from them something of beauty.