Dark Devotional: You Want It Darker?

“When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.

“Nice bit of verbal wriggling there, Lord,” I mutter as I read. “Legal Twitter would be impressed. You only have to remember Your covenant when there’s a rainbow and anyway, You don’t have to do anything, do You? We’ll quite merrily destroy all flesh on our own. Hey, wait, do cockroaches count as ‘flesh’?”

It’s raining outside, so I expect lightning to strike at any moment. Instead, the sun comes out and the birds start chirping, tempting me to test my luck and add, ‘You took that well.’

Yes, I cheek God like that (usually worse) all the time, and it’s not light-hearted: there’s always something simmering underneath. My relationship with the Immortal One is probably best summed up by Leonard Cohen:

Magnified, sanctified

Be thy holy name,
Vilified, crucified
In the human frame
A million candles burning
For the help that never came –
You want it darker?

Hineni, hineni – I’m ready, my Lord.

A million candles burning for the help that never came…

…when my uncle sexually abused me from when I was 5 to when I was 9

…from the relentless emotional and verbal abuse with the odd side helping of physical

…from the endlessly bleak childhood desert, survived by becoming a spore

Burning, guttering, leaving me in darkness. And some days, the jury is still out on the ‘help’ which came and kept me here on the day that I had one leg over an 8^th floor balcony railing.

I am a child of darkness – born shortly before midnight under a new moon, to parents deeply traumatized by the horrors of Partition, desperately wanting this newborn to fill their emptiness, unable to love the soul given to them. That darkness has shaped me more than almost anything else: it permeates my humor, sharpens my edge, ensures that I turn to Criminal Minds long before I touch a rom com, makes me rejoice in the lengthening darkness of the latter part of the year. Oh, and the anger is on a long, slow, lifetime simmer.

It also means that I read this Sunday’s passage in Genesis with a dismissive wave and a Gen X eye-roll. As my desi family and friends might say, ‘Covenant, shmovenant.’ I learned early that promises are made to be broken.

Yet, as dismissive as I am of the rainbow’s promise, I’m magnetically drawn to Mark’s gospel, though his version of the forty days is, like most of his gospel, a bit wanting in the details department:

The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. ¹³ And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him.

Yeah, you’ll always be my first choice of storyteller around a campfire, Mark.

But this week, something other than the temptation holds my interest, because Mark’s breathless narrative does something important. Immediately before, in verses 9-12, we have:

In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. ¹⁰ And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove; ¹¹ and a voice came from heaven, “Thou art my beloved Son;^[2 with thee I am well pleased.”

The juxtaposition of the Father’s ‘I love you’ and the Spirit’s driving Jesus into the wilderness finally lands.

I don’t doubt the most common reading of the voice from heaven, that it is an exhortation to follow Jesus. But more and more often, I’ve heard it as reminder to Our Lord in His humanity, ‘Thou art my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased…and that won’t change, no matter what. Take that with you, because now it’s going to get really, really hard.’

Both of today’s readings make promises. God’s promise in Genesis is essentially, ‘Sorry, guys, you made me really angry, so I thought I’d wipe everyone out. I promise it won’t happen again. *rainbow*’ God’s promise in Mark is, ‘I love you. Now I’m pushing you into your impossibly difficult life and mission, beginning with sending you into the wilderness to face yourself.’

I may roll my eyes at the former, but the latter resonates deeply, because in the absence of parents who could love, so many others stepped into the vacuum and did: friends and their families, teachers, mentors, who said, “We love you, we’ve got you, now go do the hard thing, because you need to live and grow.” Their love made getting through the difficult and painful possible, so I can absolutely believe that the Father was offering the same to His Son.

Mark doesn’t tell us what happens in the desert, but Matthew and Luke do, though I don’t interpret it the way they do. To me, that meeting in the desert feels more like that of a student with a weapons master who tests strengths and weaknesses, bringing them into the light. I read these gospel accounts and don’t see the more recent Satan, but the older ha-satan, which translates to ‘the adversary’:

“The adversary” is a member of God’s heavenly council, who says he had just returned “from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”

I imagine ha-satan feinting, looking for anything that would prevent Jesus from completing His ministry: will He use His divine power to make things easier for Himself? Will He use ostentatious demonstrations of His connection to the Father to make the people follow Him? Does He trust the Father? Will He give in to the temptation to temporal power, leaving His ministry behind? Once satisfied that Jesus will not be diverted from His ministry, the prosecutor leaves, allowing angels to step in and minister.

A hunger, perhaps even the Spirit, drives me into following in Our Lord’s footsteps as the twilight grey of Lent descends every Ash Wednesday. I walk into the desert to meet the adversary, to wrestle with angels and demons, to be stripped right back so there is nothing between me and my Creator. Ha-Satan steps out and begins:

Riches? Not really, as long as I have what I need and can give to others.

Power? To make the world better, maybe? Also to smite…*raised ha-satanic eyebrow*…joke.

Jump to see if God will catch you? Oh hell yes, erm…ok, I have trust issues. Can I test Him once?

And so on. Resentment? Hatred? Judgment? Yes. Yes. Yes. Finally, I turn and scream:

I hate humanity, even as I fight for it. Do you hear me? I despise it and in my heart of hearts, I think God ought to send another flood and do it right this time. And while we’re on the subject of Mr. Omnipotent, I don’t think He gives a damn about me or anyone else, because where the f*** was He when we were suffering? Is that what you wanted to hear?

A moment of silence, a nod and a smile. “Yes.” And he disappears.

I close my eyes, exhausted, afraid to open them and see, afraid to let myself feel. The night and I may be lifelong companions, but there is one darkness that terrifies me: the cold, dark, endless Cthulhic darkness, sterile and lifeless. But I have learned that turning away never changes the truth, so I open them.

At first the darkness is total, so I try to ‘feel’ it. It is soft and it…hums? In that instant, I realize I’m in the void of Genesis, filled with infinite possibility. In the next, pinpoints of light start to appear against the darkness, until they blanket the darkness like crystals on an Indian wedding lehenga. They are the lights of those teachers, friends and their families, mentors, confessors, those who touched my life briefly and left me changed. Among them are things I hold most dear: justice, compassion, protecting the vulnerable, and that which encompasses them all – love. My stars, by which I navigate this night journey. From their midst emerge the angels who come to minister. I close my eyes again, this time in rest and surrender.

At long last, I believe the words of Sarah Williams’ Old Astronomer I now whisper as my prayer:

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night. 

——-

Irim Sarwar is an American of IndoPak ancestry now living in the UK who was born Muslim and became Catholic via teaching at a Modern Orthodox Jewish school. Biology degree, Education Masters, but has catalogued books in a Dominican priory, worked in quality assurance at an evangelical mission institution, and is now freelance proofreading and copyediting as she looks for a job. Definite mongrel. Believes in hybrid vigor in all things, especially journeys of faith.