Anam Cara

Our Secret Kinship with the Darkness

Regardless of how lucky, blessed, or privileged one might be, there is no person that is not called at some time to walk through the bleak valley of suffering. This is a path without hope, without shelter, and without light. When suffering comes into your life, it brings great loneliness and isolation. Your life becomes haunted; your belonging breaks. Suffering and pain can assail us with such ferocity, because darkness is so near us; within this darkness, our longing is numbed and calls out for release and healing.

Though you live and work in the light, you were conceived and shaped in darkness. Darkness is one of our closest companions. It can never really surprise us; something within us knows the darkness more deeply than it knows the light. The dark is older than the light. In the beginning was the darkness. The first light was born out of the dark. All through evolution the light grew and refined itself, until, finally, a new lamp was lit with the human mind. Before electricity came to rural areas, the candle and the lamp brightened the home at night. There was one special lamp with a mirror fitted behind it to magnify the light. If you looked into the light at an angle, you could catch a heart-shaped light reflected in the mirror. It was as if the light wished to see itself. Of all previous brightness in creation, this was the new secret of the light of the mind: it was a light that could see itself. The mind brought a new quality of light, which could acknowledge and unveil mystery and create mysteries of its own.

Its eternity of patience rewarded, infinity discovered at last its true mirror in the human soul. For the first time, there was someone who could see the depths and reflect the glimpses. In a certain sense, all human action, thought, and creativity make mirrors for life to behold itself. Yet the closer our acquaintance with the mystery, the more the mystery deepens. Brightness only reinforces the opaque soul of the darkness. We forget so easily that all our feelings, thoughts, and brightness of mind are born in darkness. Thoughts are sparks of illumination within the dark silence and stillness of our bodies. We have an inner kinship with darkness that nothing can dissolve. This protects us from allowing too much outside light into the secret centre of our minds. The immensity and slow beauty of the inner life need the shelter of the dark in order to grow and find their appropriate forms.