Praying for Darkness in a Year of Glare

A Poetic Litany for Lent

1st voice:

Parent God of all of us, hear our prayer

in this disruptive year: Lord, turn out the lights.

Turn out for moments of our prayers

and for moments of our lives

all the lights we see by,

or all the lights we think we see by.

Make it dark in here, even now, in each of us.

2nd voice:

For thousands of the years in time as we mark it,

we have prayed that darkness be dispelled.

But in this new moment of our history,

in the confusion of gleaming gold and silver

narrowed into beams of fake promise, shimmerings,

flash, lies, we are blinded, we squint into

too much garish light beamed to each of us

while as citizens we’re mobbed together

with almost no light flooding out to all of us.

1st voice:

Already in semi-dark we realize

that our nightmare fears

no longer lurk in the dark of jungles

or in our boarded-up, unlit slums;

they stride in and out of fully-lit boardrooms

and powerful offices daily from 9 to 5.

Congregation:

The old symbols are changing. We are too grown up

to fear the wolf that waited in the tangled forest

behind our childhood. Huddled under lights, we no longer believe

in a specter, black hooded and caped,

who hides in the shadows to snare us.

It is OURSELVES we fear.

So now we pray you, Lord—

do not yet dispel the dark—dispel the light

a little longer.

2nd voice:

Here in the half-drowned world

that we surrender to when we sleep,

we feel the dark river that flows

through every heart-beat,

the pulse of our oldest and deepest music.

1st voice:

We see how we have hurried past the vision the psalmist knew:

“You Lord have hidden the truth in darkness,

and through this mystery you teach us wisdom.”

Congregation:

Keep us now and then in the dark, Lord.

The dark of Golgotha, or Paul’s black jolt

on the way to Damascus, or the grapple of Jacob,

to be renamed Israel, wrestling his way

in the dark from eyesight to vision—

we pray for darkness so that we may see.

2nd voice:

As we wait in the dark

we do sometimes see tracings and splinters,

a flicker of our dream of the world you gave us,

sparks and flashes we almost remember.

1st voice:

We seek moments of blindness and insight

so that we may be truly one

with the dark and lowly servant,

paradoxically “light of the world,”

who came to share our darkness with us.

In his name have we dared to ask

for dark as well as for light.

2nd voice:

Now we rest in quiet for a moment

in the shadow of the almighty,

remembering Moses and

the dark cloud where God was,

remembering at least to say what the psalmist used to sing;

“He made the dark his cover,

his pavilion is dark waters

and the dark rain clouds of the sky.”

1st voice:

Parent God, cover us, your adopted children, as in blankets,

in what St. Hildegarde called “the cloud of our unknowing.”

Hold us here in darkness a moment more, a moment more,

we want to see again from behind the eye,

it is here we can dream and remember and imagine deep—

as Hebrew prophets did—as children do.

Congregation:

As we emerge out of this dark into light, show us, God,

as for the first time, freshly, the rich glowings of our different skins,

the eyes of the oppressed piercing dark skies like beacons,

the flares of wonder that play in the eyes of our children.

Congregation and Voices:

By way of darkness, seeing fresh, Lord,

we pray to live again in the wonder of light. Amen.

Rod Jellema (1927-2018) was a poet and professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, where he was the founding director of the university's creative writing program. His books of poetry include A Slender Grace, Something Tugging the Line, The Lost Faces, The Eighth Day, and Incarnality: The Collected Poems. Jellema was the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work was awarded the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Contest, the Pieter Jelles Prize, and a Columbia University Translation Prize for his translations of Frisian poetry.

Reformed Worship 126 © December 2017, Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. Used by permission.