Finding our Middle – 40 Days with Anna

Day 36 – Tuesday in Holy Week 

To Read:

MAYBE it was the fact that Anna and I had met at night that made the night-time so magic for us.  Perhaps it was because the night-time could be, and so often was, so surprising.  The multitudes of sights and sounds of the daytime got down to manageable size at night.  Things and sounds became separate at night, they didn’t get muddled up with everything else, and things happened in the dark that couldn’t possibly happen in the daylight.  It’s not impossible to have a conversation with a lamppost at night;  do the same thing in the daylight and they would take you off in a padded van.

‘The night-time is better.  It stretches your soul right out to the stars.  And that’, she pronounced, is a very long way.  In the night-time you don’t have to stop going out.  It’s like your ears.  In the daytime it’s so noisy you can’t hear.  In the night-time you can.  The night-time stretches you.’  

I wasn’t going to argue with that one.  The night-time was the time for stretching, and we often stretched ourselves.

[Later around an open fire] ……Anna thought for a moment, then said, ‘Mister, why do you like living in the dark?’

‘Living in the dark?’ smiled Old Woody…  He paused, and then, ‘Do you like the darkness?’

Anna nodded.  ‘It stretches you out big.  It makes the box big.’  He gave a little chuckle.  ‘Indeed, indeed’, he said.  ‘My reason for preferring the darkness is that in the dark you have to describe yourself.  In the daylight other people describe you.  Do you understand that?’

Anna smiled, and Old Woody reached out a gnarled old hand and gently closed Anna’s eyes, held both her hands and settled some inner aspect of himself.  This particular little spot in London Town looked by daylight a shambles;  at this moment, in the light of the fire, it was pure magic.

To Reflect:

The words ‘Darkness is the only safe space’ have lived with me every day of every year of this century.  I first encountered them when on a retreat with the Community of All Hallows in Ditchingham.  These words have, understandably, helped me through some dark and distressing times.  But, with Anna (along with Teresa of Avila whose spirit these words reflect) I have also found the darkness to be a place of comfort and of calling.  A place of what I can only describe as comfortable nakedness that our first parents knew when God made everything good (Genesis 2v25).

Anna is correct, the darkness ‘stretches you out big.  It makes the box big.’  When we let the light fade we can see clearer because the brightness and the noise of the day doesn’t get in the way of our vision.

Like many people I grew up being frightened of the dark.  Looking back I think it was because I am a lonely person (and for the most part I am content with that) but that doesn’t mean I enjoy being alone.  People don’t always see that side of the gobby vicar from Suffolk but if a label was needed for me it may well be that I am a gregarious solitary…..

Formerly when darkness fell, or the light went out suddenly, I used to panic and my feelings of being left alone deepened.  Not so anymore.  ‘Darkness isthe only safe space’ for it is there that, in the dark we can see deeper and further and better and know in the depths of our hearts that though we might sometimes be lonely we are never alone.

Holy Week has many moments of darkness and not all of them happen at night.  In the middle of them all, if we but open our ears and our eyes we will see and hear a love calling us to the safety of a heavenly home.

My favourite gospel singer Amy Grant, who has known several moments of darkness in her own journey home, sings about the safety of the darkness in her song ‘Here’…

Time to read again the words the young Princess Elizabeth gave to her father the King to read to a nation facing the darkness of war…

 

Please Note:  These reflections are also published on my blog: suffolkvicarhomes.com on Bluesky as @suffolkvicar.bsky.social, and on my public Facebook page  Suffolk Vicar – Rev Andrew Dotchin.  If you would like them as a daily email please send a request to revdotchin@gmail.com

If you have enjoyed reading them please make a donation to The Clergy Support Trust who provided a  generous grant to help me find the space to compose them.