We’ve got to problematize how we see darkness.

This week, in our Petty Prophets group chat, we were talking about what it means for us to continually associate darkness with evil when God formed the world out of darkness.

Darkness represented possibility to God. God looked at darkness and saw what could be—not because it was destructive and needed to be tamed but because it was generative and held boundless potential.

Where there is evil, we should name it as such. But we gotta stop calling darkness an evil. It robs darkness of its holiness and denies the power of the sacred.

This ain’t to say the personal darkness we experience isn’t painful. It’s not even to say that darkness may not lead us to make some destructive choices, harming ourselves and others. Neither is it to say the darkness, brought into our lives by others, is justified.

It is, though, to name that even in the depths of our darkness, the holy is moving through it—making and remaking us. Opening us up to deeper relationships with the Divine, ourselves, our close community and the world around us.

The psalmist said “the darkness is not dark to you” and it shouldn’t be dark to us either.