Spirituality, Therapy, and the Good Life

Here in the northern hemisphere tomorrow is the winter solstice, an acknowledgement of that darkness which marks the longest night and shortest day of the year. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote the following on Darkness:

“You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything;
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!—
powers and people—
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.”

Matthew Fox asserts that our spiritual journeys involve traveling four essential paths – the via positiva, the via negativa, the via creativa and the vis transformativa (I’ll be writing more about each of these paths in future posts.) When we enter the via negativa, the second spiritual path, we’re invited to be still, to embrace the silence, and to learn from our inevitable suffering.

I have never welcomed winter, nor will I ever choose to set foot on the path of the via negativa willingly. And yet, I’ve come to trust that while I may not be able to bravely dare its darkness, when I’m able at the very least to endure it, I eventually find myself deepened and poised for new growth as I emerge into the light.

While reflecting on a time that author Sue Monk Kidd encountered darkness, she wrote, “Everything incubates in darkness. And I knew that the darkness in which I found myself was a holy dark. I was incubating something new.

Whenever new life grows and emerges, darkness is crucial to the process. Whether it’s the caterpillar in the chrysalis, the seed in the ground, the child in the womb, or the True Self in the soul, there’s always a time of waiting in the dark.”

At some point on December 21, 2011, during the shortest day and longest night, I’ve committed to considering what might be in the process of incubating within me, what might require the dark in order to bloom in the light.