The Darkest Night

This post was written on Christmas, 2021. Then and now, I see this season as a time of introspection and the removal of veils. When the world grows dark, we know ourselves by the light within.

Last night, I was reflecting about the purpose of struggle and hardship in the process of developing the light of the soul.

Humans are narrative creatures. Inside of the stories of our lives, the drama or challenge we face are effectively plot devices that reveal who we truly are and who we are becoming. When the stress of a challenging circumstance bears down on the individual or the group, Life is giving us the grist for the mill of our evolution and transformation. As we enter this season of darkness in the Northern Hemisphere, amidst a world that is shrouded in darkness, who are you becoming?

In service of that process of soul discovery and expansion, I offer you the prose below.

Image by Dan Hillier (@mrdanhillier)

There is medicine in darkness. What light reveals, darkness hides.

What is hidden now among us? What is hidden in the flesh of matter, longing to burn free?

In the absence of all outer light, we can see only by the light within.

On this darkest night, the light of our hearts shines into our collective shadow and we give it a name. We call it Fear of Death. An innocent yet endless pursuit, only desirable once faith in wholeness has been desecrated, completely, across the land. And it has. Over millennia. The pain runs like blood across generations. Only once separated from our Mother, cast out of the Garden and into the desert of the so-called real could humanity be herded like cattle into their own slaughter.

And it was called “freedom.” The sanctity of choice became synonymous with slavery. Free to consume. Free to numbly avoid the rotting pain of our world. Free to dissociate from and repress our shadow with addictive industrial chemicals and meaningless labor.

It’s understandable. How could we stand before the aweful complexity of existence and not recoil in powerlessness?

We have surrendered our choice, our wholeness, and our connection to God in exchange for safety and certainty. Safety in a story, a noble lie, a seemingly sufficient cultural vessel to ride the waves of the Great Mystery, driven by our fear of being swallowed up by the sea.

But the seas of the Great Mystery are churning. Her feminine wrath overturns the overconfident sailors who’ve lost reverence for her power.

The path is and has always been glimmering before us, but it is not for the faint of heart. To bear the immense lightness and fullness of being requires a perpetual death and rebirth, a perpetual living into the mystery, a continuous surrender into the immanent, an unconditional love for all that arises. This is the path of the Christed Ones, those who die before they die, those who integrate the fear of death by aligning with that which is eternal and ever changing.

The path of Christ is the path of realizing the inherent wholeness that always was, renewing an ever-deeper harmony with our Source, and redeeming our pain through loving awareness of its perfection.

On this darkest night, our Christ Light rises to illuminate our shadow. We have always been whole. Merging our individuated identity within the body of life, we are both finite and eternal. Reborn free from fear of death, we are free to truly choose. We look towards the coming of the light, in earnest fellowship, in beloved community, and we walk each other home.

May the Indwelling Christ Light rise through you, emanating into the deepest darkness. May your light form a planetary constellation of light, whole unto itself as each sovereign part is unto itself whole, emanating love to all that is. May this field of awakening stir the inherent divine spark within all beings, realized, renewed and redeemed by the coming of the dawn.

Ameyn.