October 2026
The balance of the days shifts as the nights lengthen, the clocks change and we tip over into a time of winter and darkness.
What might the dark say to us about God?
If God is the creator of all that exists, and if there is nothing created that does not exist in God, we surely find God’s creative genius in the dark?
And if so, will we not find that the dark can be a positive space?
Yet often we see the dark as something dangerous and forbidding, something to be avoided. We often link darkness with our fears and failures. But if the dark is also where God is, could we use the dark to deepen our relationship with God?
Dark allows us to see things we would not otherwise see – the moon and the stars, the blooms of night time flowering plants, numerous nocturnal creatures including bats and moths. Dark is the natural habitat of many creatures. Dark is restful, enabling sleep. Dark allows seeds to germinate and sprout. Dark allows things to mature, including both wine and cheeses. Dark enhances our perception of our senses. We seem to hear better, to experience smell and taste differently; we may even see more consciously in the dark.
Psalm 139:12 says “even the darkness will not be dark to you, the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.”
Let us then embrace the dark and find enrichment in this season.
Darkness
your grand circle engulfs
all the small bright circles
of the world. None
can withstand you:
meteors trailing their lights
through space, this slim
candle on a shelf.
All selves
belong to you, began
in you. You place
a hand on my shoulder, shift
hand to wrist, feel my pulse.
Your gentleness moves
me to belief: in
darkness.
Alan Payne, after Rilke
The Other
There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl calling
far off and a fox barking
miles away. It is then that I lie
in the lean hours awake listening
to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and falling
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village that is without light
and companionless. And the
thought comes of that other being who is
awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.
R S Thomas
The Peace of the Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
To know the dark
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
Both by Wendell Berry
