Sunday, November 5, 1:45-ish p.m. The storm knocked the power out in South Marion. The outage was wide-spread, but not a crisis. Everyone on campus either carried on with homework by whatever meager light they could summon from a window or phone, or they took the free excuse to relax. I did some mixture of the two. Eventually, like everyone else, my phone battery forced me on a pilgrimage to the Marion bypass.
At this point, the dark was merely inconvenient. A few friends and I emerged from our little hole on campus to squeeze into Starbucks alongside every other student enrolled at IWU. Then my roommate and I went and sat for a long time at Steak N’ Shake because the order tickets got mixed up what with the crazy apocalyptic crowd and all. But we didn’t care. What else were we going to do once we got back? I wasn’t afraid of this dark. Just thrown off my schedule by it.
In the past, I’d actually been sympathetic with the dark. Was I sometimes afraid of having to walk to my car alone after sunset? Absolutely. But I also thought frequently about the fact that, at the creation of the world, day and night existed. So darkness was just a metaphor to me, permeating the Bible and our language in general. It’s an archetype of destruction, despair, misfortune, fallenness, the general state of our world as opposed to heaven. Sometimes the real dark equally potent, and sometimes not. I was at times afraid of the dark, or what might hide in it. At other times, I found the night beautiful, and mourned its associations.
But the darkness ceased to be pretty when my roommate and I finally finished our dinners and I had to drive us back to campus. The dark was no longer contained inside buildings. It had flopped down all over the street, and I was nervously urging my roommate to navigate me through a disabled intersection that doesn’t easily function as a four-way stop what with its multiple lanes. Plus, the road lines had mysteriously disappeared.
“Stop here.”
“Am I even in the lines?”
“You’re good. Ok, go after them.”
I clicked my brights on and off, only subduing them out of courtesy for sporadic approaching traffic.
“I do NOT like this.”
When I got to campus, we parked and began walking around the building to the working front door. We could hardly see the sidewalks, and those only thanks to the flashlights on our phones. The bulky storm-clouds had locked in the dark, and yet it felt uncontained, stretched out further than I would have been able to see in normal circumstances. This was total darkness. Total darkness was not pretty.
I realized then that I had liked the kind of darkness that stars shone through as if through pinpricks in a thin blanket. Or the kind of dark where the snow sparkled under the streetlamps like itty-bitty Christmas lights while I walked to let out my neighbor’s cat, who was also very nice and comforting. What I liked was muted light, where I could see colors in a deeper hue. But this was entirely different. Inside, the emergency lights in the hallways had long since turned off. Now our residence hall was the set of a horror movie. The railings on the balcony looked like sporadic hallucinations. The gaping space beyond the railing looked less like a lobby and more like a sinkhole into the underworld. Walking was better than hurrying, because I had found out earlier that if you hurried, it felt like you had a reason to. An active imagination is not always fun. Particularly in the total dark.
Is this what the darkness metaphor always meant? If the world is dark, is it South-Marion-power-outage dark? Is it totally dark?
I think this is sometimes how we do portray the world. When we use the phrase “the real world,” we’re either referring to stressors— burdensome workloads, taxes, hectic schedules and simultaneous droll routines, the “less fun” adult world— or true tragedies— disease, poverty, injustice, pain of all kinds. So are we all at a ridiculous metaphorical intersection where the traffic lights are out and we’re just hoping we’re actually in the left turn lane and that our roommates have better night-vision than ourselves? I hope not; and I think not.
It is true that in preparing for the real world we must pack our flashlights, our phone chargers, and our-first-aid kits. But that is not all.
The power outage lasted twelve hours at maximum. I experienced total darkness in that time, but my overwhelming reality features lights, even if dim or tiny. We may experience total darkness. But God does not abandon us to it; it does not need to swallow us. Remnants of God’s goodness remain even in the fearsome dark. There is comfort. There is help, material and immaterial. There is a future. God’s work through His people raises redemption up even from a struggling earth, and people still find occasions to smile. And heaven is rolling in behind the bulky clouds, to surprise us like lightning.
In the real world, the snow sparkles underneath the streetlights. And in the real world, eventually the lights will come on.
For this reason, though the world may be dim, it is not wholly dark.