My divine darkness and His divine light combine together to become love…

By Tiziana DellaRovere

Yesterday in the late afternoon, due to a power surge, all the lights in my house went out. Suddenly, I was in complete darkness. Instead of being startled, I felt comforted. My body sank into a state of restful surrender, my mind emptied of all thoughts, and my heart was soothed by the tranquility of that darkness. I felt safe. There is a time for light, and there is a time for darkness. 

We are moving rapidly toward winter, a time when many people feel depressed—too much darkness. But is this refusal to enter into darkness purely physiological or does it have an emotional/spiritual component?

For eons, the word darkness has been synonymous with evil, sin, and ignorance.“Dispel the darkness,” we often hear. “Bring in the light!”

In the collective psyche of humanity, light is good, spiritual, pure, and superior. It belongs to the “above,” to the heavens. Darkness is bad, earthly, impure, and inferior. It belongs to “the below," to the realm of hell. We trust the light, we long for the blissful, rarefied transcendence of the brilliance of the light. We mistrust darkness. We believe that, in its obscurity, it hides all sorts of menacing dangers and evil creatures.

This collective archetype of the fear of darkness has created all sorts of social, spiritual, and personal horror in the world. Perhaps the most evident consequence of this prejudice in our society is the pernicious and persistent discrimination against people with darker skin and the belief in the superiority and privilege of light-skinned people. Another consequence of the entrenched belief that what belongs to the Earth, the darker density of the physical world, is inferior to the brilliant lightness of the spiritual world is that in the Western religions, we have relegated God to being a Father who dwells only in the light of the spiritual heavens, and we have expunged from our theology God as the Mother who lives amidst us in the darker folds of the earth. God has lost Her body and has become only the Godhead.

This denigration of the Mother and exultation of the Father is the foundation of all patriarchal religions, and has had nefarious consequences in the relationship of power between men and women. It has given men a God made in their own image while women have been left without any image of the feminine God to identify with, expelling them from the realm of the Divine.

In Western patriarchal religions, women have been represented as the temptresses, symbolizing the corrupting desires of earthly sensuality. They have been hurled from the perfect purity of the light into the imperfect, disheveled, denser realm of the Earth and the body. This split has created untold horror and torture, from the millions of women burned at the stake during the Inquisition to the deaths by stoning and acid thrown in the faces of girls that continue today. Both the darkness of the Earth and women have been demonized, while the light has been divinized.

No wonder we fear darkness. Our collective unconscious is conditioned to mistrust darkness. Nobody, not even women, likes to identify with the oppressed, tortured side of the equation. We all want to huddle around the “winning” side, the “superior” side of the light. We are all “children of the light.”

But are we really? All of us are conceived through the union of a seed of a man and the egg of a woman. We all come to life in the womb of our mother, a womb that is dark and filled with nourishing fluids. We are born out of her belly through a process that involves all sorts of bodily fluids—sweat, blood, amniotic fluid, screams, tears, smiles, sighs of relief, and the cries of life being born. Birthing happens in a sequence that is not orderly, tidy, organized, clean, or controllable. It is a magnificent burst of creation that comes from the deepest, darkest place within a woman—a fractal that is part of the greater cosmic creation of God as The Mother.

Scientists now believe that about 74% of the universe is dark energy, and 22% is dark matter. Current theories suggest that the universe was created out of the states of vacuum/energy, a dark nothingness which is filled with that which we cannot see. Is the realm of the light the only bastion of the divine or is there also darkness, which is filled with goodness and divinity? We talk about the light of God, but we never talk about the darkness of God. I want to reclaim divine darkness as the realm of the Mother filled with potentialities yet to be expressed, as the beauty of the concentrated density of life, as the deepest mystery of the womb of creation. Divine darkness embraces us with comfort and soothing rest, and asks us to surrender to the unknown. There, in the womb of God, we find the tenderness of love that cannot be understood, but can only be felt when we close our eyes and sink deeper within, into the stillness of the divine darkness that marks our beginning and our end.

"The grace that streams from My being into you, My cherished child, is made of My love-filled divine darkness ignited by the love-filled divine light of the Father. My divine darkness and His divine light combine together to become the love that moves through creation as divine grace."

Adorata: The Path of Enlovement
The Virtue of Grace

In our Western mainstream tradition, the dark Mother, the earthly aspect of the Divine, is personified in the Black Madonna. The many miraculous and highly-regarded shrines of the Black Madonna are objects of pilgrimage and worship for people since ancient times. In the next issue of The Adorata Newsletter, I will continue this exploration of the divine darkness as it is embodied in the Black Madonna.

Tiziana DellaRovere is the founder and spiritual director of Adorata. 

Photo by Luz Adriana Villa A.