To "Face" or "Embrace" the Darkness around us?

                And here we are.  And here is the middle of the semester.  And we have approached the middle of the semester.  And so now here is where we are.

                At the moment there is no new material to mull over.  But that’s appropriate, isn’t it?  We are halfway through a significant leg in our educational journey, and would it not make a mockery of the knowledge we have passed by if we kept on going without stopping to remember it?  That’s almost like making a promise to a friend, as you say goodbye for quite a while, that you will think of them daily and miss them.  But then you are doing well to think of them once a week and have found that making new friends was not so hard.  And that old friend has slipped from your memory.

                Well I do not wish to slight that old friend by failing to remember him, so I have looked back at lessons learned in the first half of the year in hopes that I will hold them with me always.

                So I decided to look back at Professor Corrigan’s article “Darkness, Questions, Poetry, and Spiritual Hope”.  Professor Corrigan often asks us, in class, what has “struck” us.  So I think I shall beat him to the punch line.

                His lines toward the end of his essay struck me: “In poems that embrace darkness, hope is sometimes a footnote.  This is to not pretend to embrace darkness while really rushing to the light.”

                What is “darkness”?  Dictionary.com provided me with six definitions, so let’s look at these for a moment, shall we?

1)      THE STATE OR QUALITY OF BEING DARK: THE ROOM WAS IN TOTAL DARKNESS.  Well this first one is pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it?  With the example tagged on the end, we almost feel like this is a no-brainer.  But with all of the semantics surrounding the word “dark/darkness”, perhaps it’s not as self-explanatory as we had hoped.  So let’s continue.

2)      ABSENCE OR DEFICIENCY OF LIGHT: THE DARKNESS OF NIGHT.  Okay, so maybe this one helps us out a little bit with the first one.  We can use this one to help us elaborate on the first one.  So now we know that darkness is all about lacking light.  The example talks about the darkness of night to help us picture the definition.  But then what does light mean to darkness?

3)      WICKEDNESS OR EVIL: SATAN, THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS.  Well this seems to portray darkness as something less than what we had hoped, does it not?  The lines from the essay talked about embracing the darkness.  There are several places in Professor Corrigan’s essay, though, that talk about “facing darkness”…So are we to “face” or “embrace”?

4)      OBSCURITY; CONCEALMENT: THE DARKNESS OF THE METAPHOR DESTROYED ITS EFFECTIVENESS.  Everything is not clear, this definition is saying.

5)      LACK OF KNOWLEDGE OR ENLIGHTENMENT: HEATHEN DARKNESS.  So darkness is ignorance… Should we, then, be rid of darkness?  Or maybe ignorance is not a fair enough word.  The definition uses the words “lack of knowledge”, so as to say a lack of what is to be known.  It also uses the words “lack of…enlightenment”, so as to say a lack of coming to the point where a person realizes “this is what is actually right” and/or “what I had previously thought was wrong”.

6)      LACK OF SIGHT; BLINDNESS.  Darkness means being blind.  Are we to embrace being blind?

And so this essay, when looking at the definition of darkness, raises many interesting questions. The answer to one, though, I feel rather confident about:  Do we face darkness or embrace darkness?

We face darkness.  As to whether or not we embrace darkness, are we not then embracing: the state of being dark, the absence of light, wickedness, concealment, lack of enlightenment, and blindness?