Finding Faith in the Dark

Darkness demands faith as it distributes fear.

That's what my mom meant after I told her about the doubts and questions I had been having about our religion. She told me she didn't know the answers to my questions but finally she said, "I just think you need to have faith in something, Kaitlyn."

I didn't know what she meant that day, or for many days and years after. At the time, her answer left me deeply unsatisfied, confused, and angry.

Darkness is uncertainty in the flesh. We fill the void with the expanse of our dreams and our nightmares, unable to tolerate the deafening silence of the mystery.

We're so quick to flee the darkness, to rush towards light as if death itself were trying to wrap us in it's cold embrace.

If only we can keep our eyes open long enough, we can begin to make out shifting shapes, a mirage of moments and fractures in time. Soon the darkness can show us what the light cannot.

Darkness holds more than our fear and suffering. It holds deep, richly nourishing soil. A place to rest in metamorphic slumber. To listen for the distant and near rumblings of our languishing,  longings, and loves. To root into the darkness cradled by the compost of all the fear and joy and love and pain that came before. To transform what was into what could be. It demands faith we can endure the fear of uncertainty and find more than death in darkness.

That's what my mom meant that day. Faith is the promise of life and the truth of love. It's the spirit of nature and hope for tomorrow. It can't be owned, a slave to certainty and control - faith is to be danced with and held in tender embrace, caressed with whispers of creation.

My faith doesn't look like my mom's did - it lies in the murky abstraction of mystery, and I think if she were reading these words, the tight corners of her mouth would bend and break and the dawn of her subtle smile would crest the dark night and fill her with the warmth of love's golden light.

She'd realize all those years I was lost in the dark dodging death, grasping for anything to hold onto, in the rich soil of darkness, I finally found faith in something.