For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Walk as children of light, for the fruit of the light[a] is found in all that is good and right and true. Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness; rather, expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly, but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”
Ephesians 5:8-14
During this Christian season of Lent, the world has witnessed a renewed explosion of violence. The expansion of the joint US-Israeli war machine into Iran—tested on Palestine, Lebanon, and beyond—has been “dark” indeed. The demise of the so-called “rules-based order” of international relations, though never applied evenly by its apparent guardians in the West, has revealed the bare face of American imperialism. The ongoing brutality and violence of Israel against Palestinians in Gaza (or, rather, the rubble that remains) and the West Bank has brought the “hundred years’ war on Palestine” to unimaginable lows.
Such are the “works of darkness” we witness to today (Ephesians 5:11). And much of this evil, it must be said, is perpetrated by those Paul in our reading calls “children of light” (Ephesians 5:8). Interconnected Christian ideologies of white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism, Zionism—these are deeply implicated in the examples mentioned above. That there remains only feeble resistance to these structures of power and oppression from within these forms of Christianity is only further confirmation of our profoundly dark condition.
In past decades of polite western liberalism, these truths about the condition of our modern world were perhaps easier to cover up and hide. What has become clear at least since the various right-wing reactionary movements of the past decade is that such politeness was always a pretence for something deeper. In the exposing of these lies, the truth has been laid bare for more to see. The mask is off. These are dark times indeed.
Yet such a reading of modern history often equates “darkness” itself with evil, sin, and chaos. In this binary, “light” becomes synonymous with “white”—taking on an altogether new pernicious, political reality. In our racialised context, the Christian aesthetics of “darkness” and “light” have been made into weapons of violence against Black and brown bodies, against what we might call “dark” life and lives. Indeed, as Andrew Prevot contends, white supremacy can be understood as “nothing other than this symbolism writ large” (166). That is, the crude but nonetheless very real application of dark-white aesthetics on a bad-good binary “forms conscious and subconscious categories of bodily perception, shapes cultural and political institutions predicated on such categories, and supports practices of violent exploitation and enforcement” that undergird our racialised world order (166).
In our world today, dark bodies have been read as the antithesis of white bodies, who are said to represent the Human Body par excellence. Reading Ephesians in this context, then, means reading it from the perspective of the dark, which is to say from the underside of our modern, racialised histories.
Howard Thurman, for example, in The Luminous Darkness, offers tantalising connections between the dehumanising experiences of segregation and the apophatic struggle found within contemplative mysticism. In the preface, Thurman frames his exposé of Jim Crow with a story about a diver who enters into the darkness of the ocean depths. As this diver travels further and further away from the sunlit surface, Thurman writes, “slowly his eyes begin to pick up the luminous quality of the darkness; what was fear is released and he moves into the lower regions with confidence and a peculiar vision” (10). Though Thurman leaves this parable largely unexplained, the connections between this mystical descent and lived realities of segregation burst with possibility; as Prevot ventures, “the message seems clear enough: the ocean depths symbolize both the experience of black life in U.S. society, which segregationists fear, as well as the infinite mystery of God for whom light and darkness are one. … In the dark, one may be closer to God than one is in the light. Moreover, it is impossible to possess the fullness of light without venturing through darkness” (171).
Similarly, W. E. B. Du Bois’ exposition of Black life famously reflects on the revelatory possibilities of “seeing in the dark.” In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois describes being Black as being “born with a veil” and so “gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields … no true self-consciousness” and so can only be fully understood “through the revelation of the other world” (8). Through the opacity of “dark” life, the truth about the conditions of our white supremacist world are revealed more clearly. Alternatively, those who profess to live in the “light”—glowing in the bask of their apparently civilised ways and white mastery of the world—are in fact blind. Their own inability to see Black life, that is, to live through sites of divine darkness and illumination, gives them only a false and violent enlightenment.
Our passage concludes with Paul quoting part of what is likely an early Christian hymn: “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (Ephesians 5:14). By casting his message in eschatological terms, Paul clearly lays out the stakes of his exhortation. By dealing death on dark life, whiteness and white supremacy reveals itself dangerously asleep, and so liable to divine judgment. Black life, alternatively, is already “awake” with the illumination of a future reality in which the dead things are brought back to life.
Yet the conditions of our current moment continue to squash possibilities of seeing this resurrection life manifest among us. From such sites of ruin—from the victimised, the invaded, the brutalised, the oppressed—Christ’s revealing light may only appear at the end of a very long tunnel, if at all. Divine darkness is as much a struggle for faith as it is an incubator for Black hope. Prevot again: “The God of the oppressed is also the God of the opaque. We need a Christian spirituality that can struggle with the disconcerting silences of the divine liberator, which are experienced daily by those who are dark and beautiful and forsaken” (170).
These are dark times. The crucified of history continue to face untold horrors, committed in the name of the light. From this vantage, however, comes new forms of life and resistance—forms which, precisely in their dark witness, apprehend reality more fully for what it is. God apprehends God’s creation in darkness, and through dark life, reveals.
