The Light that Ecological Darkness Cannot Put Out
(Note: This blog is especially for the Advent and Christmas season. It is posted early so that people in congregations may have it in time for their preparation for the season.)
Ecological crises are settling across our planet, pushing past dusk into a cloudy, moonless night. Even Christmas 2016 cannot cool down the hottest year on record. According to the frequent updates from science, what is happening ecologically well exceeds the response of civilization’s largest institutions so far. The average global temperature continues to rise. Best estimates project that in just eight more years (2024) Earth will be 1.5° Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels. And only 12 years later (2036), the globe will be 2° hotter—a temperature that scientists have warned we must not reach. It’s the point at which extremes of weather and changes in thousands of local environments assure massive human migrations. Humanitarian organizations warn that they cannot handle crises of that scale. Conflicts between peoples increase as seas enter coastal cities and food crops fail in the fields of large regions. Where will you, your children, or your grandchildren be living when those eight and 20 year milestones are reached? Pardon such an impolite question.
We so need to hear words that turn us around, like “Let there be light!” from the Creation Story in Genesis. Those words—the speech of divine consciousness—transformed a dark, chaotic planet. The story says simply: “and there was light.”
But today no light seems strong enough to break through the darkness settling over us. Too many systems of the world, though operating at a feverish pace, remain stuck in the thinking of MultiEarth ways. The light they claim to generate turns out to be illusionary. Their egos cannot imagine a response that fits the problems they’ve created. What is needed is the light of a new consciousness—one greater than our egos, one united with the divine.
The Christmas season speaks of such a light. Around the world before and during Christmas, Christian congregations read a 2000-year-old text of a light that is strong enough to challenge the gathering ecological and civilizational darkness. The opening verses of John’s Gospel, words perhaps too familiar for hearers to pick up on their stunning relevance to Earth’s ecological insurgency, tell how the creative logos, which is from “the beginning”—long before current institutions existed—brought forth life and light strong enough to bring order into disorder. (The Greek word “logos” has various uses and meanings, including word, speech, reason, logic, and principle of order). That the author intentionally parallels the Genesis story is obvious, opening his Gospel with the same phrase “In the beginning....” Clearly, he is about to tell a story which in his mind is akin to the Creation Story in its size and purpose. His lead character, Jesus, further explicates the logos by embodying it and repeatedly pointing out that everyone embodies it (John 1:7, 10:34, 14:12, and compare John 8:12 with Matthew 5:16). Jesus’ ability to transform people happened, he repeatedly pointed out, because they came to have faith in a new and greater consciousness that was divine, sacred, and most especially, in them and in the interrelatedness of all things.
John thought this to be mighty good news—which a gospel must be by definition. He claims that the transforming light of the Genesis story was being freshly brought to bear on the darkness of the world in his 1st and 2nd century time. He wanted people to continually recall that “the light shines in darkness and the darkness has not put it out” (John 1:5). Ego consciousness cannot hold onto this way of thinking. The darkness is too strong. False lights are too deceptive. But when we humans move from ego to divine consciousness, we shape life by that light. It is this light, this consciousness, this logos that no ecological darkness can put out. The economics and spirituality of Jubilee express this logos, but it remains unrecognized as the light that it is because of the powerful darkness of various economic models and powers that satisfy ego’s fear-based needs for acquisition and control. Only in divine consciousness does living the Jubilee, as Jesus so intentionally did, become a primary way for us to live faithfully and sustainably in Earth’s community of life.
And here’s another matter of importance to John. As he sees it, the light that shines is not just an external light shining into the darkness. More significantly, it is light shining from inside of the darkness.
When we can see that the darkness has within it a light that the darkness cannot put out, it shifts how we live. This kind of light-darkness relationship is highly paradoxical. Thinking in paradox is part of the greater consciousness that we need in our current ecological and civilizational darkness. Ego consciousness imagines that transnational corporations, which continue to put power and profits ahead of planet and people and all that populates Earth, have the winning hand. Yet, that seemingly winning hand intensifies global warming, species extinctions, and most human life as well. The darkness delivered by this “winning hand” continues to thicken.
But Spirit consciousness sees something more. It sees that when such MultiEarth darkness intensifies, whether it ignorantly or willfully struggling against the light, the light inside the darkness doesn’t weaken, but becomes stronger. What appears to ego consciousness to be the winning hand cannot be played without paradoxically assuring that OneEarth light will break out. In a remarkable irony, the darkness grows the capacities of the light, developing its muscle.
Like a pine nut inside a lodgepole pinecone lying on the floor of the forest, only the heat of an intense fire can break the cone enclosure and release the seed. Only after the ordeal of the fire’s heat that breaks down the cone can the seed break out and sprout a new pine tree. Life paradoxically emerges from death, which is exactly what happens when light encapsulated in darkness breaks out. The harder MultiEarth darkness doubles down on its money-growing and power-accumulating actions, the more intensely the light shines.
Might not then the breakthrough be upon us when light shining out from within the ecological darkness surprises us? Faith in some current expression of divine logos and gospel is not far-fetched. Based on how light and darkness interact throughout nature, we are in a highly paradoxical moment between now and 2050. The momentous surpassing of 1.5°, and then 2°, herald an intensifying darkness which inadvertently, but certainly, increases light’s power to breakout. The deeply hidden hope in this kind of consciousness does not minimize the pain involved in the metamorphosis required. The breakdown of civilization due to the warming it has caused on Earth is as assured as the pinecone’s breakdown in the fire. The upheaval of breakdown is underway. The sheer numbers of our species and our lifestyles are expanding beyond Earth’s capacities. Oceanic patterns are convulsing. Global markets are never far from another collapse. Few nations, their governments owned by transnational corporations and powers, govern to fit our ecological crises. We have entered an early to middles stage of apocalypse. The greatest surprise, however, is not the intensity of the apocalyptic unraveling of ego-driven, MultiEarth civilization, but in the breakout of the light that results. The pinecone is already breaking down.
True apocalypse does not escape the horrible, it only knows that inside of the horrible is a more powerful logos, a mighty light that breaks out. If we are true apocalyptists, we believe this. We believe in both the breakdown and the breakout. The severity of the trauma as the ecological darkness unfolds in this century cannot be denied into nonexistence. We have not yet gotten through the worst of it. We have tarried too long in MultiEarth civilization to escape the darkness those choices inevitably bring. Yet, in whatever ways the darkness proceeds to crush life, the light is being strengthened. A new creation is being shaped by thousands of actions smack in the middle of the darkness.
The ecological darkness is calling out from us that which we did not even know was there. Nothing except love calls it forth as effectively as does deepening darkness. And ecological darkness is already showing how its intensity stimulates the capacities of creativity as thousands of small ventures into OneEarth living come together. The darkness is not only unable to put these out, it actually brings them forth. The darkness does not have the consciousness to know it is defeating itself. As one translation of John’s Greek words puts it, the darkness does not comprehend how the light works. This is the true light, active in the world from “the beginning.” But its activity also depends on us to convert into the greater, divine consciousness which comprehends the paradoxical relationship of darkness and light. Then the light’s greater powers breakout.
