Befriending Darkness

For a long time, I’ve considered the word darkness synonymous with evil, harm and trauma. But in the past few months, I’ve encountered a symphony of voices inviting me to reframe my posture towards what I avoid being overtaken by at all costs.

On New Year’s Eve, 2016, in her watch night speech entitled “Breathe and Push”, Valarie Kaur asked:

What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country that is waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor? What if all of our grandfathers and grandmothers are standing behind now, those who survived occupation and genocide, slavery and Jim Crow, detentions and political assault? What if they are whispering in our ears “You are brave”? What if this is our nation’s greatest transition?

Robert Macfarlane in his book Underland: A Deep Time Journey, writes:

Since before we were Homo Sapiens, humans have been seeking out spaces of darkness in which to find and make meaning. It’s something seemingly paradoxical: that darkness might be a medium of vision, and that descent may be a movement toward revelation. Often, your mind is screaming at you not to enter this space, because it perceives it as a place of confinement and deprivation, but it can also be a place of discovery.

And this week I began reading Jan Richardson’s Advent guide entitled Night Visions.

We require darkness for birth and growth: the seed in the ground, the seed in the womb, the seed in our souls. Darkness bears the capacity for good. Our work is to name the darkness for what it is and find what it asks of us. We must wait for the darkness to teach us what we need to know.

What were some of the darkest seasons in your life growing up? What trauma was happening during those times? How did it condition you to fear the uncertain, the unknown, the unseeable? What story do you need to tell in order for this season of Advent and its accompanying longest nights of the year to become a time of birth, revelation, and learning?

The Cost of Admiration

Twice in the past two days I’ve encountered the word admired…

A dear, brave friend voicing a question reverberating around inside her like bellows bouncing off canyon walls:

 “Do I live in a way that chooses to be admired at the cost of feeling connected?”

 A narrator’s thoughts in Kristin Hannah’s novel The Nightingale: 

 “If I had told him the truth long ago, or had danced or drunk or sung more, may he would have seen ME more than a dependable, ordinary mother. He loves a version of me that is incomplete. I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I’d like to be known.”

I take note of these moments as someone also seeking to turn away from the instinct to impress that hinders me from closeness with others. After years in a family dynamic that bred competition with my own mother, the journey of surrendering the strategy of admiration has been long. Desperate for the fleeting sense of safety that came with having the upper-hand, even at the age of seven, it was always a catch 22. Neither the resentment that “winning” inevitably brought nor the humiliation that accompanied “losing” allowed me to draw close to my mom.

 Someone once said to me:

 “You are too good of a woman to invite people not to like you.”

That is what the quest for admiration, a rising above, invites--a distaste for and distance from the goodness of who we are.

How was being known and connected unavailable to you growing up?What traits or accomplishments were admired in your family culture? How was your unique form of “achievement” your best strategy for connection then, but now, years later, is actually sabotaging belonging?

Reframing Our Names

Our image of world leaders Nelson Mandela and Adolf HItler have little in common. One is credited with the destruction of apartheid in South Africa, the other is synonymous with the word genocide. Both, however, had names with tenuous beginnings.

Born Rohihlahla Mandela, his name meant “troublemaker”. While in school, it was an English teacher who gave him the name Nelson meaning “champion.”

Hitler’s name meant “noble wolf.” His desire to be an artist was a source of contention with his father, a traditional-minded, authoritarian man who considered the idea ridiculous. Adolf described himself, even by age 7, as an aggressive ring leader.

These men’s life stories are much more complex than these few facts, but they illustrate the truth that though we do not choose our names, what we do with them is crucial to who we will become over our lifetimes.

In his book To Be Told Dan Allender writes:

“The journey of our story truly begins when we start to see that the name we have been given is not our truest name.”

Once we realize the names we carry are not our truest selves, entering into greater freedom requires their reframing. To reframe means to see in a new way or express something differently. The painting below of a Chicago skyline demonstrates how frames can minimize and cheapen, hide and overwhelm or draw out and display with reverence the beauty in a work of art.

But how is something invisible, such as a name, reframed? What does it mean to shift how others define us and how we have always seen ourselves?

The clip below (until 3:37 time stamp) from the movie Silver Linings Playbook powerfully captures how words of identity, within the context of relationships, are reframed.

Though reframing almost never happens within a three-minute conversation and the battle with our inner voices, rather than someone else’s view of us, is typically more fierce, it is the data of the story that makes reframing possible.

What names have you been called in your lifetime? What given names, nicknames, adjectives or phrases were spoken over your identity growing up? What stories of those moments, if told, would invite you to see yourself in a new way or express yourself differently?

Dangerous Disguises

In the past few months I’ve come across two remarkably similar quotes, both from men with first hand experience enduring violence. Though their suffering ran deep, it seems it was not the power of their enemies that left them terrified but the way harm disguised itself.

In 1963, in a letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. penned:

“Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

In 1987, in his book One Generation After, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wrote this prayer:

“As for my enemies, I do not ask You to punish them or even to enlighten them; I only ask You not to lend them Your mask and Your powers. If You must relinquish one or the other, give them Your powers, but not Your countenance.”

When have you encountered trauma that wore a superficial smile or spoke pleasant platitudes? Where are places in your story you showed signs of wounding but the presence of harm was bewilderingly masked? What punishment or rejection, if clearly seen, would have been less disorienting to engage?