In this darkness is there also light?

Over my 82 years, I have had many experiences of darkness coming and darkness going away. So when I try to comprehend theologians who teach and mystics who experience non-dualism, who say darkness and light are one, I am mystified.

Recently, posted in our Provincial House's "Daily News" channel, were the names of three sisters with COVID-19 who are "diminishing" right now. That is, for them, death is imminent. In just a couple of weeks, the nursing home wing went from no COVID-19 at all during this entire pandemic to 8 to 12 to 27 to 47. With nine deaths already and maybe more coming, the outside world's darkness has stormed into my world with darkness that seems the deepest I have ever known.

But in this darkness is there also light? Am I so formed by night following day following night and so much cultural dualism — so stuck in dualism — that I am unable to believe that dark and light are one?

"Lord, I accept, or at least I want to."

A few years back, during one Advent week, I had cataract surgery. I was unaware that I was living in semi-darkness until after the surgery. But when the Christmas tree lights went on, I saw anew: the white lights, the red balls and the silver tinsel were so bright! Cataracts, growing over time, had dimmed my vison, blurred my seeing. Ever so slowly darkness had slipped in. I did not see it, so to speak, until the cataracts were removed. In my new light, I saw the darkness, i.e., light came after darkness, not within it.

A few years earlier, another deeper darkness grew in me ever so slowly. The darkness of depression starts with only slight, unnoticed shadows around one's being. My depression, intensified by anger, stayed unnoticed even as it grew darker and darker. One day, sharing tea with a friend at a McDonald's in Hoboken, I lowered my head to the table and could not raise it. A few days later, when my body slipped to the floor in a psychologist's office, I could not stand.

The wise doctor said, "Sister, this will end, but not tomorrow." Unlike the instant cure of darkened vision that cataract surgery brings, the cure for a darkened spirit was a two-year furlough from teaching and five years of first daily, then weekly, then monthly therapy. But I learned, as many do, that my darkest days yielded new light, light that changed the second half of my life for the better. Again, after the darkness came light.

How many times have dark times led me to new, life-giving light? So are darkness and light one? It did not seem so.

"Lord, I accept, or at least, I want to."