February 16: Light Shines in the Darkness
In a dark time the eye begins to see. Theodore Roethke
Gregg’s Reflection
There’s a truth we learn slowly in the spiritual life: our eyes adjust in the dark. At first, it feels like a void — empty, silent, disorienting. But over time, even the faintest glimmer becomes visible. Shapes emerge, and with them a sense of direction.
The dark night strips us of our familiar ways of experiencing God, but this deprivation opens us to a deeper way of seeing. Like the blind whose other senses grow sharper, we begin to notice the subtler ways God’s presence reaches us. Grace flows even when it is unseen, and, in our faithfulness, we become quiet conduits of that grace for others.
In this space, we discover a light only darkness can reveal — a light born of surrender. It’s the clarity that comes when we finally let go of our illusion of control and accept the truth: there is a God, and we are not it. On the far side of darkness, life begins again.
Scripture
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and night wraps itself around me,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is light to you.
Psalm 139:11-12
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
John 1:5
Ancient Quotes
Leave behind the senses and the operations of the intellect; be raised up to the ray of the divine darkness.
Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, I
Modern Quotes
In a dark time the eye begins to see.
Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time”
The dark night, which deprives us of our customary ways of experiencing God, draws us into an infinitely richer, more luminous, and ultimately boundaryless way of experiencing God, of finding our way to perfect union through love.
James Finley
When we are united with God in silence and darkness and when our faculties are raised above the level of their own natural activity, and rest in the pure, tranquil, incomprehensible cloud that surrounds the presence of God, our prayer and the grace that is given to us tend of their very nature to overflow invisibly through the mystical body of Christ; and we who dwell together invisibly in the bond of the one Spirit of God affect one another more than we can ever realize by our own union with God.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 272
There is a light in us that only darkness itself can illuminate… The light we gain in darkness is the awareness that, however bleak the place of darkness was for us, we did not die there. We know now that life begins again on the other side of the darkness.
Joan Chittister, CAC Morning Meditation, 12/4/19
Journaling Prompts
- Where have you seen God’s light break into your darkness?
- What small lights—truth, beauty, kindness—are sustaining you now?
- How could you be a light for someone walking in their own dark season?
- How will you learn not to fear the dark, not to run from the desert, but to wait in stillness for God’s wisdom to lead you forward?
👉 Go deeper into this week’s theme:
Read the full Week 7 Reflection: Dark Night / Cloud of Unknowing