ENDARKENMENT

In Portland, OR, on every Good Friday in the Seventies the downtown big church ministers sponsored an "Endarkenment" service to prepare for Easter dawn.  One of the church sanctuaries had no windows, so as the story of crucifixion was acted out -- with Jesus speaking through a PA system -- the lights were turned off, one after the other.  When we were sitting in total darkness, we pondered in silence for long minutes before the lights came on and we went about our business.

The UU ministers were always a little nervous about the strand of religious dogma exploring "endarkenment," a word meant to counter "enlightenment" which is often used religiously to mean seeing the final truth.  Others use the trope of light/seeing/understanding to mark science as a higher form of understanding.  The science-honoring ministers joked about endarkenment, esp. the ones who suffered from it in their private lives, not knowing what to do about things like their own family wars.  Sometimes endarkenment is used to refer to the "dark arts" like witchcraft, magic, sorcery.  The Dark Web carried the meaning to secrecy, even the illegal.

Science as it stands does not replace the benign anthropomorphic old white king-on-a-throne with any idea as reassuring.  But if honest believers in "God" are real, they admit that the Old Testament's jealous punisher is more than a little bit Satanic.  

Someone recently said, when the news about the Notre Dame Cathedral fire was relieved by billionaires pledging enormous sums of money, "It makes one believe there is a God after all."  Someone less sentimental suggested that if there were a God who valued cathedrals, "he" would not have let the fire start.  Divine intervention has yet to be proven.  Others cried out, "So that's where all the money for the poor and suffering has been!  Billionaire's pockets!"

We want to reform, be reborn.  But it's difficult to envision what the future might be when it's not like us and we're not in it.  This vid linked below is a version of the vision according to one rather dark branch of scientific speculation.  It is not about salvation or humans.  But it is about participation by each of us in an abstract and strange way, too overwhelmingly dark to understand.

https://aeon.co/videos/deep-time-and-beyond-the-great-nothingness-at-the-end-of-the-universe?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=693fd0c379-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_04_11_03_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-693fd0c379-68600437

Before Jesus, a body of expectation was based on the idea of "The Christ" in a world of oppression by the mighty.  It pictured the Christ as a savior coming down out of the sky at the head of a legion of angel warriors who would end the Roman hegemony.  A lot of people still appreciate that idea.  But when Jesus, the humble kid in what appears to be a nightgown, finally showed up on foot with only twelve disciples, some insisted he was nevertheless the Christ.  His weapons were love and generosity: he didn't live by the prevailing rules.  He had more of an Asian idea, as in Buddhism, and some suggest that Jesus had followed the Silk Roads out to India where he learned these ideas.  They still haven't prevailed, but we are hopeful.

Others have made a home in the dark, accepting secrecy and anonymity as a way of finding peaceful safety, avoiding the glitter, the dazzle, the wealth.  Hopefully also escaping the Stigma Cross that crucifies those who aren't part of the wealth-pursuing world that makes the cross into crosshairs marking violence compelling obedience to some new oppression.  The key idea is that we are flesh, as was Jesus, but our ideas are invincible.