The Darkness when the Clocks go Back

Jungian psychology respects and values the dark side.  Here is what Brian Draper, Associate Lecturer at the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, said in Thought for the Day on Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday 24^th October.  That Saturday night the clocks went back.

“The British Summer Time debate continues as to whether we should keep British Summer Time all year round. Studies suggest that kids are more active for longer when the evenings are light, there are fewer road accidents and we would save on energy bills.  On the other hand, Northern Scotland wouldn’t see sunrise until 10 and early birds from farmers to postal workers would be plunged in darkness for longer.

Beyond these practical arguments however it is perhaps at the visceral level that we feel our descent into the darkness of winter most sharply, accelerated as it is this weekend by the clock change and the often depressing realisation that the darkness has crept up on us again.  This is not helped, I believe, by the way we associate light and dark with good and bad.  We tend to think in terms of binary opposites, because a world of us and them, black and white and so on, is an easier place to grasp.  So when it comes to light and dark, the most primal set of opposites we have, we tend not to like the dark and try to keep it at bay.  Yet if we pause to peer into the beauty of natural darkness – for instance (our eyes do adjust and we are soon reminded of its riches), if the light didn’t fade, how could we appreciate a sunset, or the glimmer of the first evening star.  How could we enjoy a deep and restorative sleep? How could a seed ever germinate?   “At the heart of reality”, says the Quaker writer Parker Palmer “opposites cohere in mysterious unity.”  Religion, if we are not careful, can accentuate the opposition at the expense of the mystery, so we can end up believing that God’s role is just to side with us.  But it doesn’t seem to work that way.  As the poet Henry Vaughan writes “There is in God a deep but dazzling darkness.”   So much of what we have come to associate negatively with being in the dark, such as not knowing or having all the right answers, such as struggle, pain, or loss, is very much part of the mysterious unity of the whole.  Looking back to darker times in our life we can often see that this is spiritually when we have grown the most.  The 16^th century monk Jonathan Cross, from the depths of a prison cell wrote eloquently of his dark night of the soul and accepted it as a gift. 

As the clocks go back, I wonder if we can do the same with our winter darkness as much as with that extra hour in bed.”