Afraid of the Dark

I note this week a trip to the mall, after dinner, by the wife and I, to buy a birthday present for her sister. I don't venture out much after dark. I'd read in the local rag of numerous muggings in this very parking lot. Half way to the car, after Mrs. heard a startling noise, we raced to gain safety behind locked car doors and sped away into the night upon screeching tires.

There's something about the darkness which stimulates a primal hightened awareness beyond being frightened outside Sears. The ancients wrote Psalms of the terrors of night. In Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, Gregor Von Razzori writes "In the middle of an uncanny procession, in blocks that in their disciplined compactness seemed made of cast iron, people marched by the thousands, men only, in total silence, the morbid rhythmic stamping of their feet hung like a gigantic cord in the silence that had fallen on Vienna."

I'll admit I wouldn't have been surprised to hear the rhythmic marching footsteps of such a mob rounding the corner of Dick's Sporting Goods bearing down upon us in the mall parking lot. Yet it's not always easy to imagine the difference between light and darkness.

According to the NY Times, Turkish lawyer Fatma Benli devotes her profession to fighting domestic violence, honor killings and gender discrimination while simultaneously insisting "on wearing an Islamic head scarf which goes against enforcement of official Government secularism." She says, not "wearing the scarf seems like a denial of freedom; medical students can get diplomas, housewives can't take driving lessons, a civil servant takes another woman, uncovered, to official ceremonies as his wife." When that which we in the West consider an ultimate symbol of the denial of freedom - headscarves - is itself prohibited by law, the right to wear a scarf transforms into a struggle for freedom.

Neil Young was quoted recently, "I know that the time when music could change the world is past. I really doubt that a single song can make a difference. It is a reality."

Good old sour Neil Young always can be counted upon to ruin the party. I must respectfully disagree with the man who creates music which stirs the pot even if he denies it. Perhaps what he writes today doesn't carry the magnitude of impact his curmudgeonly ego demands, but let me play 'Ohio,' off the well-worn, ash-smudged, scratchy LP, on the rickety faithful record player, and I'll still sally forth to change the world.

There's light, yet, in darkness, even death, framed in the obituaries of lives played out in the surrounding countryside - "she grew up on a farm in Dogue; she attended a one-room schoolhouse, riding a horse; she graduated from Mary Washington Teacher's college; she was a member of the Altar Guild, taught Sunday School, a member of the Historical Society; she was preceded in death by her husband of 66 years.

It's harder to see light now; it's dim these days, yet still glows stubbornly, perhaps, less dramatically, in simpler things, than rock festivals or protest marches. Rather than an unthinkable incandescence of books burning in the night on the cobblestone streets of an ancient city like old Vienna, we have a bookmobile. Once in a long while a hooligan breaks a window as it sits parked behind the library downtown but it's back on the road every day, carrying the lights of literature and history, to 7000 people a year, three dozen stops, at senior citizen homes, post offices, along the rural routes of small towns, and at preschools, serving children "who are checking out a book for the first time."

There are always those in positions of authority, who intentionally, or with reckless disregard, choose to play upon the darkness. A consequence of the recent restoration of the beautiful Latin Mass, is the re-promulgation of Good Friday language, which beckons the faithful to "pray for the Jews. May the Lord Our God enlighten their hearts so that they may acknowledge Jesus Christ, the savior of all men."

Prior to Vatican II, Good Friday prayers were even more blatant, calling for outright conversion, to lift the veil of blindess from Jewish hearts. The new-old version, however, isn't any more pleasing or considerate to contemporary Jewish sensibilities. One Vatican spokesman, seeks to mitigate the offense by offering most Catholics will still worship employing the vernacular, not Latin Mass, anyway. I think he's missing the point.

The finest notion of darkness, cast as sin, I've come across, is St. Augustine's simple definition of sin as falling back into bad habits. It's why the dark is so appealing, comforting and painful at the same time. We want to be good; it's just too hard, or as Augustine originally wrote, 'we want to be good, not just yet.'

We can draw upon community and books to try and move to higher consistent levels of conduct while still believing there is a grace abound that allows for an occasional falling back into bad habits. If you respect the original sin that lies within, aware of its dark compelling power, and counter by striving towards the light of good intentions, I'm hopeful that what counts in the end, salvation-wise, is the desire, and the attempt, not any self-proclaimed attainment, or posting of rules for same, intended for others presumed less enlightened than self.