Darkness has been on the agenda this week. With the changing of the clocks we lessened it in part but also increased it . This manipulation of nature only works for a short while, in a few weeks, darkness will take us all into its experience.
Yes, the days will grow shorter. Seldom is the process of equinox met with joy. This year, much like last, our journey into natures darkness is occurring alongside a range of dire warnings that could make even the most optimistic want to cling to the dying light. There is however every reason not to despair. Darkness, if we dare to go beyond our dread of it holds much for us.
The themes of light and darkness feature large in the living of faith and at times in associated celebrations. Our attention is drawn to this fact at this time of year more than any other. The equinox itself is an invitation for us to think differently and consider developing a different relationship by which we favour and value the darkness just as much as the light. It is the Pagan, or in reality not so Pagan, festival of Halloween that puts this particular paradox firmly on the agenda.
The symbolic significance of Halloween for people of all faiths and spiritualities can easily get lost in its commercialisation. In addition, misunderstanding of the festival has also done much to distract us from its real meaning. From ancient times until now Halloween invites us to recognise that this is the time in the cycle of the year when light and darkness are balanced., Halloween occurs within this annual period which, for us all, heralds’ transition.
All Hallows Eve, as Halloween is also known, proceeds of course All Saints Day, a time when we in the midst of life pause and remember those who have died. Across cultures and faiths Halloween and its position in the cycle of the year once again presents us all with the paradox experiences of night and day, light and dark, the life and death experiences at the heart of every faith. Indeed, at the heart of every life.
We often deal with experiences of paradox by choosing or favouring one or the other, it is our biggest mistake. Our failure to go to the middle ground, to bring the oppositions together always takes us into conflict. Yes, we avoid the struggle and yes, we create a comfort zone and preferring such over an opportunity for faith tells us, we miss out, we miss the point and we miss the opportunity for faith to teach us and enlighten our lives.
With Halloween putting darkness onto the paradox agenda in the particular way it does, it reminds us we can take a different approach. Rather than banishing the approaching dark season we can start to think of the approaching winter as an important time for our experience of faith and our struggles with life.
Darkness is the winter of the soul, a time when it seems that nothing is growing. We also know that winter is the fallow time of the year. The time of the year when the earth renews itself. It is also exactly this process which sits within struggle. Unbeknown to us, struggle is the call and the signal that we too are about to renew ourselves. Whether we want to or not.
Halloween and its ancient symbols remind us to reflect on aspects of life we would often rather avoid. Darkness like winter we think holds nothing of promise. But faith, once again via the experience of our struggle with paradox, tells us something different. Faith tells us that the approaching darkness of winter is a lesson about the fine art of loss and growth. Its lesson is clear; there is only one way out of struggle and that is by going into its darkness, waiting for the light and being open to new growth. That sounds of course like the very last thing we would want to do. Faith as always tells us different.
This Halloween like all those gone before from ancient times until now is, as ever, occurring at a time of struggle. 2025 does not in fact have the monopoly on struggle, or on faith. Throughout our ages, struggle is what forces us to attend to the greater things of life for ourselves and yes, at times for others.
Day after day in the prison and probation service I and colleagues are confronted with lives at their barest, we are presented with people’s pasts shaped by the harshest of the winter of life and the darkest of nights. It is often an act of nothing but faith when we give the message that the task is to begin again. An act of nothing but faith when we ask the men and women we work with to take the seeds of the past and give them new growth. But over time it is faith in humanity that enables us to see that indeed, given the chance, people do.
So as the ancients believed that Halloween was the time when the boundary between opposites was thin, we too can, for those we work with and for ourselves, recognise that it is growth that is the boundary between the darkness of unknowing and the light of new wisdom, insight, vision, new life.
Faith tells us that life begins on the other side of darkness. That life does in fact begin again after the particular winters of life, after the losses, rejections, the failures. Life goes on. Differently, but on.
After darkness we are never the same again. We are only stronger, simpler, surer than ever before that there is nothing in life we cannot survive, because through life and its changing seasons are come to accept that life is bigger than we are and in it we are meant to grow to our fullest dimensions.
As Og Mandino says of darkness and light “I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars”
Br. Stephen Morris fcc
