Learning to See in the Dark

I’ve been watching the show Welcome to Earth on Disney+ and on one episode Will Smith goes to the bottom of the ocean floor in a submersible with a giant plastic bubble for a ceiling. There he discovers, along with the real explorer marine biologist Diva Amon, that the darkness of the ocean depths is putting on a light show—if you know how to look for it. At the end of the episode he says, “I really only learned how to see when I descended into darkness.”

That’s also a major theme of the Christian tradition.

We often expect God to deliver success, ease, or prosperity. Martin Luther called this a theology of glory. But a theology of the cross reveals that God is actually “hidden in suffering”—God is most present when we are at our lowest.

When we suffer, many of our typical comforts, ways of coping, ideas and plans are stripped away and we are faced with the our barest selves. But it’s also then that we are able to bring our truest selves to God, and in its in our truest reality that God meets us and transforms us. Scripture also says that as we suffer, we participate in Christ’s suffering—and somehow, miraculously, in Christ’s life (ex. Phil 3:10, 1 Peter 4:13).

We can also expect that God will comfort us by the Holy Spirit. As we suffer with Christ, “so also our consolation is abundant through Christ” (2 Cor 1:5). At the beginning of 2 Corinthians Paul speaks profusely about our comfort in suffering calling God the “Father of mercies and the God of all consolation.”

Through our suffering we learn to see in new ways, what Saint Isaac the Syrian calls “vision of the soul.” We learn to see in the dark.

But Tish Harrison Warren writes, “If we are to discover things that only bloom in the dark, if we are to meet any glory in our own crosses, we must cooperate with the work that suffering does in us.” She continues, “It’s a seemingly insane calling: to cooperate with God in our own undoing.”

It is not that the suffering is good, not that we can’t cry out against it, grieve, and lament. Jesus certainly did and the Psalms are full of it. In Doors of the Sea David Bentley Hart writes, “Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue his creation from the absurdity of sin, the emptiness and waste of death, the forces—whether calculating malevolence or imbecile chance—that shatter living souls; and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred.”

Suffering is not of God, but we believe in a God who can work through our suffering. And so as we suffer, we look for where God is at work.

2021 was one of my darkest years—and also one of the brightest. I saw and learned a lot of things about myself, God, and the world in the dark.

One of the biggest things I learned is that I can’t and don’t have to earn anything from God. That sounds like a thing I should obviously know. But it turns out we don’t often live out of the things we think we intellectually believe all the time.

I know that now because I’ve experienced it in profound ways. That’s a different kind of knowing. When I was at my lowest, when I could do nothing for God or for other people God, showed up with God’s tangible, physical, and spiritual presence in a way that’s hard to describe and in ways I’ve never felt before. Each time it overwhelmed me with awe and often brings me to tears because it is out of the blue and I can do nothing for it.

And that presence brings me the deepest peace and comfort I can imagine.

There other new things I understand and things that have brought great clarity and joy. And there is still darkness, there are things I don’t understand.

The way forward is murky, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:12 “For now we see in a mirror, dimly.” But I know I am never alone.

Where do you see God in the dark?