In the Dark

[Article provided by Conejo member, Ella Michael]

Two of my friends once stumbled into the Garden of Gethsemane by accident. They were following a celebration, got swept up in the crowd and carried straight to the place where Jesus prayed in the dark, begging for his life.

I’ve been thinking of this Jesus. Curled up on dirt, sobbing, blood preemptively pouring down his cheeks. In the dark Garden, surrounded by the sleeping world.

In my college years, I spent two years nocturnal.

People often think I’m joking. Or exaggerating.

But I was getting up at dinnertime, and then staying up, in a house that was silent and dark, through the night. The house was surrounded by forest. Trees and animals spoke to each other in screeching cries.

When I heard the birds, I could look outside and see the sun rise—I would feel tired, and get ready for bed. I still feel that way now, if I catch the sun rising on the days I wake early.

I was sleeping during those years. But not well. I was oscillating between twelve hours of sleep and three, and would spend days staying awake for 30+ hours to try and fix a sleep schedule I had no true intention of changing.

I spent my waking hours staring at windows that faced the darkness of the earth. Windows that reflected, in the yellows and oranges of our lamps, the shape of who I was.

I didn’t pray much, during those times.

My mother was dying. The world had shuttered itself. There was nothing that felt right in the world.

Even now, a window that peers into the night frightens me.

It’s been sewn within us—the fear of the dark. That was a consistent comfort to me during those years. It still is. The fear I felt wasn’t singular—every person who has ever lived has been afraid of the dark. Nightlights, candles, the frantic reach for the flashlight button on a phone screen, facing off against the age-old fear of predators who would hunt at night, silent and creeping.

I’ve been thinking of this Jesus.

Facing death, in the dark, terrified and crying. Crying quietly enough that your friends don’t wake. Any prayer uttered barely being words or language.

It is by accident, when we stumble into the dark Garden. Fear compounds and settles around us. The night presses in.

It is not the dark we are afraid of, but the loneliness of it.

How lucky we are then, to not be alone.

That even crying blood, quiet as we can, we are still heard by a God who tends to the growing things, that, borne from Light unknowable, bury their roots into darkness and find in it—Life.