I’m writing just prior to the Winter Solstice – December 21, 8:28am in our part of the world – which brings to mind a poem that has been a delightful companion to me for many years. It’s a poem by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in praise of darkness – actually, it’s a prayer to darkness from his book, A Book for the Hours of Prayer.

You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! –
powers and people –
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.
~~Translated by Robert Bly in Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke

I find a certain deliciousness in these darkest days of the year; my “soul” seems to appreciate them. (I think it was no great surprise to the soul when our physicists and astronomers bumped into the abundance of dark matter/dark energy in our universe.)

This is also the “dark energy” I delight to enter into on our Christmas Eve services, which, I confess – and largely because of the darkness – are my favorite services of the liturgical year.

Rev. Bruce Bode