Far in northern Alaska there is a small town called Utqiagvik. It is America’s northernmost city, and on November 18 the sun set at 1:38 p.m. and will not rise again until January 22, next year.
Sixty six days of darkness.
They call it Polar Night and while there are moments of faint twilight, the sun never breaks the horizon. To be sure, it’s not unique to Utqiagvik. There are other places in the polar circles where this happens when the earth’s axis tilts away from the sun keeping the sun below the horizon, but when I first learned about Polar Night I was fascinated. I mean, sure, in Chicago there are fewer hours of sunlight in the winter, but 66 days without any?
As I read more about Polar Night I couldn’t help but wonder how so much darkness impacts the way people experience their lives.
One person I read about described the emotional and psychological weight of it, how the body slips into hibernation mode, how simple routines become harder. Then he said something that caught me off guard, “But the darkness isn’t absolute. The absence of the sunrays allows other wonders of light to take over and transform the polar night.”
That stayed with me.
The darkness isn’t absolute.
As we enter this Advent season it struck me that this might not only be true of the darkness of Polar Night, but of all our darknesses. Not just physical darkness, but all those places where the absence of light feels overwhelming. All of the ways we experience darkness, even in the daylight.
Perhaps, in the absence of expected light, other wonders of light take over and transform the night and this is what it means to learn to see in the dark.
What we learn to watch for and maybe how we adjust our vision.
In the absence of the sun’s rays, other wonders of light take over and transform the polar night.
The darkness isn’t absolute.
The artist Jan Richardson has a wonderful Advent book of art and poetry and in the intro to this book she talks about Suzanne Vega’s song Night Vision. Admittedly, I wasn’t that familiar with it, but it’s sung to a child who is afraid of the dark and it’s about how the artist, the one singing, longs to give the child vision to see into the night.
Richardson writes, “I believe this is the gift that God holds out to us in this Advent season: to carry the light, yes, but also to see in the dark and find the shape of things in the shadows.”
An unexpected grace that meets us in our varied Polar Nights.
Advent reminds us, as Richardson continues, that while we worship “a God who lives in a blaze of glory, a deity so dazzling that humans who dare to gaze upon the fiery presence rarely live to tell the tale,” this same God also does some of their most miraculous work in the darkness.
In those moments when our memories have grown dim, or when hope feels more like myth than reality, Advent nudges us to see the darkness differently. It invites us to watch for those other, unexpected wonders of light that help us find the shape of things in the shadows.
Howard Thurman describes this kind of watching with stunning clarity:
“Waiting is to watch a gathering darkness until all light is swallowed up completely without the power to interfere or bring a halt. Then to continue one’s journey in the darkness with one’s footsteps guided by the illumination of remembered radiance is to know courage of a peculiar kind…”
I imagine the people of Utqiagvik, Alaska know a little something about this. What sustains them during Polar Night is the memory, year after year, that the light always returns. Remembered radiance. The courage that comes from remembering that even in deep darkness, the light will return and the darkness isn’t absolute. And along the way, other wonders of light help them find the shape of things in the shadows.
That is the quiet refrain of these first few weeks of Advent, whispered right when we seem to need it most.
The darkness isn’t absolute.
There are other lights to watch for. Other wonders that rise in the darkness to help us find the shape of things in the shadows.
