Befriending the Darkness
I rarely have rock music queued up while reading Scripture, but I recently listened to Just Too Much, a new release from one of my favorite bands, while reading Psalm 88. Consider these lyrics side by side. The first line in each comparison is from Psalm 88, the second from “Just Too Much” by Mark Tremonti:
“For I have had enough troubles…I am like a man without strength” (Psalm 88:3, 4)
“Sometimes it’s just too much. Sometimes it’s just not right”
“LORD, why do you reject me? Why do you hide your face from me?” (Psalm 88:14)
“But I don’t know why. Won’t you tell me?”
“Will we know why? And what would it change?”
“I am counted among those going down to the Pit…abandoned among the dead. I am like the slain lying in the grave, whom you no longer remember, and who are cut off from your care.” (Psalm 88:4-5)
Is it all just enough? Is it all we need? And will we still believe?”
That last line is from the bridge, and so poignant (you have to listen to really appreciate it). Like in Psalm 88, how can we believe that we have enough and all we need when we are abandoned, unremembered, and cut off from care? How can we believe at all in such a condition? Taking some poetic license, I’m also struck by the other repeated line in the chorus: “Sometimes it’s just not right / to bring it back together one more time / Sometimes it feels that fate / has called on me too late / to bring it back together.” Whatever Mark Tremonti means by “bring it back together,” it implies separation, cut off, disconnected. Integration is only needed where there is disintegration, and disintegration is a good description of those who, like Heman, sing Psalm 88 from the depths of their heart. Like Tremonti’s lyric, by the time we reach the disintegration and darkness of v. 18 it seems “too late / to bring it back together.”
But perhaps, with some more poetic license, the title of Tremonti’s album suggests some hope in line with Psalm 88. The album title is The End Will Show Us How. In contrast, the ending of Psalm 88 in v. 18 seems like the fullest expression of the problem. If it shows anything, it looks like a revelation of despair and final resignation:
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“You have distanced love one and neighbor from me; darkness is my only friend.”
In this post, following my post Sharing the Night, Singing the Dark, I want to suggest Psalm 88:18 as the solution, that the end of the psalm shows how we navigate through the dark night.
“The End Will Show Us How”
Psalm 88 builds, or better, descends, by a series of uneven and faltering steps, to the deepest and most dreadful place imaginable: absolute isolation caused by God himself. As June Dickie notes,
“The poet’s perception of the cause of his troubles also moves from (a) being unexplained (v.3) to (b) being caused by natural phenomena directed by YHWH (v.8) to (c) a direct accusation against YHWH (vv. 16-17). Thus…the psalmist shows a growing sense of ‘darkness’, with a climax in the last verse (and the last word).”1
By the end, the only thing left which the psalmist, and those who sing in unison with him, can claim to hold onto is darkness itself: “darkness is my only friend.” As Dickie and other commentators note, “darkness” is the last word of the psalm. The word for “friend” here comes from the root verb for knowing, as seen in some translations with “acquaintance,” which is itself a French adaptation of the Latin word for making known.
There is a certain irony here, or at least a paradox. Remembering that this is intended for corporate worship, the people of God sing v. 18 in unison: “darkness is my only friend.” Imagine that you yourself are in the dark night (which for many readers of this Substack might not take any imagining at all). Imagine sitting in church with friends on either side of you, behind you, and in front of you. You can see them. They can see you. And yet, you can’t see them. You don’t feel seen by them. You feel in your soul, you see with your soul’s eyes, what the eyes in your head would deny: you are alone in this room of 30, or 50, or 100, or 500, or 5,000. Darkness obscures all. Darkness is all you know.
Yet. Yet. This knowing is not scientific. You aren’t studying darkness in a laboratory, as if you could cut off a slice of it, stick it under a microscope, and try to adjust the lenses and bring a tiny piece of darkness into focus. No, this word for acquaintance refers, not to the Starbucks barista you occasionally pass by at Target who remembers you by your grande extra-hot PSL, but one who is familiarly known. It’s the same word as the friends in v. 8: “You have distanced my friends from me; you have made me repulsive to them.” It’s like human friends have been swapped out for a swamp of darkness.
And yet. Yet. Darkness is there. Is this the darkness of a black hole, void nothingness? How does one know nothingness? Or is it something? Or someone?
The Country From Which The Shadows Fall
Illustration by Ruth Sanderson, courtesy of Eerdmans
These are metaphysical questions, which might have limited value when we’re studying poetry. But the questions remind me of a story I recently re-read, The Golden Key by George MacDonald.2 It is a story with many parallels to the dark night of the soul. The main characters, a boy named Mossy and a girl named Tangle, journey through fairyland and discover a land of shadows which causes both desire and despair. It’s hard to summarize or excerpt MacDonald storytelling, but I’m going to share some longer quotes, starting with this section when Mossy and Tanble become entranced while walking through the Valley of Shadows.
“Looking down, they could not tell whether the valley below was a grassy plain or a great still lake. They had never seen any place look like it…It was no wonder to them now that they had not been able to tell what it was, for this surface was everywhere crowded with shadows. It was a sea of shadows…As they walked they waded knee-deep in the lovely lake. For the shadows were not merely lying on the surface of the ground, but heaped up above it like substantial forms of darkness, as if they had been cast upon a thousand different planes of the air. Tangle and Mossy often lifted their heads and gazed upwards to descry whence the shadows came; but they could see nothing more than a bright mist spread above them, higher than the tops of the mountains, which stood clear against it.”
After walking through the valley of shadows (which, yes, should be read symbolically with all of the associations that phrase activates), Tangle and Mossy are filled with inconsolable longing:
“About the middle of the plain they sat down to rest in the heart of a heap of shadows. After sitting for a while, each, looking up, saw the other in tears: they were each longing after the country whence the shadows fell.”
But, as was foreshadowed by their first guide into fairyland, they became separated:
As evening drew on, the shadows fell deeper and rose higher. At length they reached a place where they rose above their heads, and made all dark around them. Then they took hold of each other’s hand, and walked on in silence and in some dismay. They felt the gathering darkness, and something strangely solemn besides, and the beauty of the shadows ceased to delight them. All at once Tangle found that she had not a hold of Mossy’s hand, though when she lost it she could not tell.
“Mossy, Mossy!” she cried aloud in terror. But no Mossy replied.
A moment after, the shadows sank to her feet, and down under her feet, and the mountains rose before her. She turned towards the gloomy region she had left, and called once more upon Mossy. There the gloom lay tossing and heaving, a dark stormy, foamless sea of shadows, but no Mossy rose out of it, or came climbing up the hill on which she stood. She threw herself down and wept in despair.
In this central image, the valley of shadows causes delight and desire for the boy and girl because they know shadows come from light. The shadows, although they seemed “like substantial forms of darkness,” were not the real thing. Mossy and Tangle are given, not a desire for shadows, but for the country from which the shadows come. This country is a symbol for beauty, goodness, and truth, for heaven, for God; not immaterially, but as substantial reality. But the shadows are a source of desire only so long as Tangle and Mossy remain together. Significantly, MacDonald mentions that the boy and girl take each other’s hand at the outset of their journey, and when evening approaches in the valley of shadows they hold hands again to hold back their dismay. As soon as Tangle loses, or at least becomes aware of having lost Mossy’s hand, she becomes terrified.
The Golden Key
You’ll have to read the story to find out the end of Tangle and Mossy’s story. The title of Tremonti’s album—The End Will Show Us How—is also fitting for The Golden Key. All long the way they want to know how to find the lock which fits the golden key that Mossy found underneath the root of a rainbow. But the question of how they reach the end is shown to be the willingness to embrace their own end.
As they approach one guide after another, each guide says they don’t know the way, and tells Tangle and Mossy to go to yet another person who can show them the way. Then the next supposed guide says basically the same thing. Not very helpful, at least not in their desire for direct answers to the way to the country from which the shadows fall.
One guide, the Old Man of the Earth, while showing Tangle to her next guide, shows what I take to be an image for the symbol of the golden key. That is, the “key” to the way to the country of light:
Then the Old Man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole that went plumb-down.
“That is the way,” he said.
“But there are no stairs.”
“You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.”
She turned and looked him full in the face—stood so for a whole minute, as she thought: it was a whole year—then threw herself headlong into the hole.
Here, again, Tangle finds a friend who helps her befriend the darkness. “There is no other way” to the country from which the shadows fall. The way is deeper into the darkness. But, while Tangle gets separated from Mossy and travels by herself, she keeps finding safety from guides who help her embrace the difficult, arduous journey. It is impossible alone.
But together, hand in hand, voices joined together in song, we can befriend the night.
Poem by Wendell Berry
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.
Question
I felt drawn to lyric and fairytale in further meditations on Psalm 88 and the dark night, and these poetic forms can stimulate more than even the author is aware of or explicitly intends. So I want to know, what did this post evoke for you? Anything else stand out to you from Psalm 88, or perhaps Berry’s poem? If you’ve read The Golden Key, what comes to mind when you consider that story through the lens of the dark night of the soul?
I have one final post planned for this brief series on the dark night of the soul, where I see Psalm 88:18 ultimately leading. Hint: there is one who, in truth and not just in a fairytale, threw himself headlong into the hole of death and befriended darkness on our behalf.
1 June Dickie, “Psalm 88 within its contexts (historical, literary, canonical, modern, and psychological): Do they help with interpretation?”, 6.
2 The new Eerdmans edition illustrated by Ruth Sanderson, published in 2016, is sadly already out of print. It’s available via a print-to-order publisher, but the quality is subpar. Get any edition and read this, it is so go; there are many cheaper editions available, or read online for free.