Posted on: 22nd October 2024

It seems that this year has been a year like no other for the Northern Lights in the United Kingdom. According to those in the know, apparently this is all to do with the sun reaching a maximum in its eleven year solar cycle. Again last night the Lights were visible here in the north…and yet so far we, at home, have successfully managed to miss them! They must certainly be a fragile and transient phenomenon as my wife received a text from a friend down the road last night with a stunning picture of the aurora from her back window…yet by the time we looked…it was all gone and the night sky was that familiar dark canvas over towards Emley Moor.

In not many weeks now (yes really!) those beautiful words from the Prologue to the Gospel according to St John will once again form the Biblical canvas on which preachers will bring in the Good News of the incarnation on Christmas Eve… ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.’ (John 1:5). The interplay between light and dark is not as clear cut as sometimes we would hope, for underlying the supposition that light is good and the dark is somehow sinister is an interesting and complicated dynamic. The truth is that without the dark there would be no canvas for the light to shine upon.

If there were no dark would we see the Northern Lights? If a church were not in darkness would we ever really appreciate the depth of beauty and meaning that is represented by a candle guttering in the distance? If we have never at some point lived through the Dark Night of the Soul, as John of the Cross described that journey through a place where our faith feels fragile and our lives chaotic and painful, would we ever truly appreciate the grace of the redeeming love that Jesus, the Light of the World, bathes us in?

Arguably not.

The darkness is the canvas on which light paints a picture of hope. That eternal hope is something we can reassure our children and the world with as the darkness swirls around us, the darkness of addiction, poverty, homelessness, death, loss and globally the terrible events in the Middle East. All this darkness is the canvas on which, through Christ, we find hope.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (John 1:1-5)