Sunday Week 4 of Lent Year B
What’s worse than being ill? … being ill at night! You’re huddled there, sweating and shivering and aching. You feel like death—in fact you half wish that death would at least get it over with—you feel like death and there in the middle of it all you find yourself wishing the light would come, wishing day was here, wishing night would end. We’d rather be ill by daylight. But why? The ache’s the same. The fever, the shakes, the same. But somehow having them in the light seems different. Easier to bear? Less isolated? Somehow we feel safer when day dawns. So we long for the shades to brighten and night to give way to day.
That’s one experience—when the ache is physical—but I imagine we all also know a parallel longing for the dark. When the ache is emotional, the misery mental, when life seems too much like a pathless wood, when the day is grey inside and clouded. Why, then, we can long for dark to fall and cover us, for light to fade and hide us from other peoples’ joys and our own pretence, for the day just to be over so we can sleep and forget.
Add comment March 9th, 1997