COMMENTARY: Darkness and the Quest for the New

c. 2003 Religion News Service (Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.) (UNDATED) Thanks to hard-working family and professional movers, moving day ends with our possessions under one roof. I take the dog for a 10 p.m. walk. This is my first […]

c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

(UNDATED) Thanks to hard-working family and professional movers, moving day ends with our possessions under one roof. I take the dog for a 10 p.m. walk.


This is my first nighttime experience of our new neighborhood. If I face one direction, I see the glare of a street light from a nearby corner. If I face the other, I see the darkness of countryside.

I turn toward the night.

Trees are vague shapes. Our new roadside mailbox is faintly detectable. A distant thunderstorm spackles the sky. The darkness feels enveloping.

As a city boy, I find the darkness of countryside strange. Its total absence of manufactured light seems otherworldly, as if I had stumbled into an earlier century. Darkness voids familiarity. My sense of hearing perks up to compensate for darkness-impaired vision. I sense the dog’s movement in and out of tall grass.

Chief among modernity’s victories has been the conquest of night. Unless we choose darkness or suffer a power outage, we need never stray beyond light. We have blurred the historic divide between day and night. We can walk, work and play any time we want.

One consequence is that darkness comes to feel dangerous. With adjacent streets lighted, a dark street feels ominous. So do dark corners, the backside of shrubs, unlighted stairwells, even the tops of trees.

Night, for many, becomes an enemy to be mastered. Lock the doors, stay inside, listen for odd noises, and if you must go outside, be alert. As cities often discover, fears of nighttime danger fulfill themselves in encouraging nighttime danger.

When the Gospel of John tells of a Pharisee named Nicodemus coming to Jesus “by night,” I suspect our modern ears hear overtones of danger and hiding, as if night could only be a time for skulking. If Nicodemus came by night, then he must fear discovery.


That might be the case. But if we moderns were to walk country roads in natural darkness, we might understand Nicodemus differently.

Rather than hiding, maybe Nicodemus was simply moving about at the only time available to him, like a part-time student attending night classes. Rather than skulking, maybe Nicodemus wanted the nighttime’s sense of possibility, as the familiar becomes vague and other senses perk up. Rather than braving danger, maybe Nicodemus was walking a dark road in the evening cool and saw light coming from the house where Jesus was staying.

The story says Jesus opened the Pharisee’s eyes, for Nicodemus knew much as a “teacher of Israel,” but he didn’t understand the new things God was doing.

Jesus spoke of people being “born of water and Spirit.” Neither was a new image, but water and Spirit were being made new. Where could Nicodemus come to understanding? In the stark light of day, where everything is familiar, all faces known, all corners lighted, all routines monitored, all movements traced? Or at night, where familiarity is lost in vagueness, other senses perk up, and possibilities come into being?

Nicodemus was on a quest for the new. And nighttime is a time for the new. Maybe not the nighttime rendered ominous by too much manufactured light, but a natural, otherworldly darkness, like the midsummer’s night once imagined by Shakespeare, where all things become possible.

Christianity has embraced modernity in many respects, from electronic music in worship to the Bible on CD to pastoring by e-mail. Modernity is hotly debated in other respects, such as sexuality.


Christianity’s encounter with modernity has coincided with a surge of fundamentalism. It seems to me that our mounting intolerance reflects too much manufactured light. In rejecting ambiguity and diversity, some say that only the starkly lighted and crisply defined can be true. Some say dark corners are inherently dangerous, as are movements that are sensed and not literally seen, and sounds that we can’t immediately peg.

Modern fundamentalism likes to portray itself as bold, but I think it is just fearful. Rather than seek the new and the possible, rather than embrace vague shapes and allow all the senses to perk up, fundamentalism tries to nail down every detail, like a sodium-vapor street light flooding every corner and making nighttime feel dangerous.

DEA END EHRICH

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