Christmas Eve

These are the darkest nights of the year, they can trick you, you look up and you think it must be very late, you should be done with what you are doing, but then you look at the clock and it's barely five.  So dark, these nights, and the nights last so long.  And now it's Christmas Eve, and the night is darker than any other.

I know the darkest nights of the year mean the light is about to begin growing again, it means the days will soon begin to get longer, I know that.  I like the light, it cheers us up, it keeps us going.  I know all of that, but I also know, on Christmas Eve, this darkest of the nights, I know that I need the dark.

Because it's only really in the dark, the deepest of the dark, that I can talk at all to God.

I'm sort of a skeptic and there's a lot I don't believe, and I don't care for people making up rules and telling me they are God's rules, and it seems a little crazy to me to say that one group of people were given all the truth about God and the rest of us weren't, but in the dark, well, in the deepest dark, that's when I'm able, if I'm able at all, to talk with God.  The dark that erases time, removes location.  The dark that could be now or later, the dark that could be here or there.  It's in that dark, and especially that dark in the darkest time of the year, and maybe most of all, in the darkness at the end of Christmas Eve, that I can not only talk to God, but imagine God, imagine God without what I've been told about God, just God in the dark.

It's in that sort of dark that I come to God not as a father, not as a middle aged American, not as an architect, not as a runner.  I come to God not as a liberal, not as a writer, not as a brother.  I come to God not as a gay man.  I don't really come to God at all in the deepest dark, I'm just there, just here, just sitting there in the dark.

Merry Christmas, all of you.  Be well.