蜜芽传媒

Tomorrow morning, if you鈥檙e lucky, you鈥檒l get the extra hour to sleep in, afforded by the clocks reverting to Greenwich Mean Time. Tomorrow evening, however, as the sun sets at around quarter to five, we may not feel quite so cheered.

The debate continues, as to whether we should keep British Summer Time all year round - studies suggest that kids are active for longer when the evenings are lighter, there are fewer road accidents, we鈥檇 attract more tourists, and save on energy bills. On the other hand, northern Scotland wouldn鈥檛 see the sun rise until close to 10am, and early birds, from farmers to postal workers, would be plunged in darkness for longer.

Beyond the practical arguments, however, it鈥檚 perhaps at the visceral level, that we feel our descent into the darkness of winter most sharply - accelerated as it is, this weekend, by the clock change. And the fact that it鈥檚 an often depressing realisation - that the unwelcome darkness has crept up on us again - is not helped, I believe, by the way we associate light and dark with good and bad.

We tend to think in terms of binary opposites, because a world of 鈥榰s and them鈥�, 鈥榖lack and white鈥�, and so on, is an easier place to grasp. So, when it comes to light and dark, which is the most primal sets of opposites we have, we tend not to like the dark, and try to keep it at bay.

Yet if we pause to peer into the beauty of natural darkness, for instance, our eyes do adjust, and we鈥檙e soon reminded of its riches. If the light didn鈥檛 fade, how could we appreciate a sunset, or the glimmer of the first evening star? How could we enjoy a deep and restorative sleep? How could a seed ever germinate?

鈥淎t the heart of reality,鈥� says the Quaker writer Parker Palmer, 鈥渙pposites cohere in mysterious unity.鈥� Religion, if we鈥檙e not careful, can accentuate the opposition at the expense of the mystery... so we can end up 鈥榖elieving鈥� that God鈥檚 role is just to side with 鈥榰s鈥� against 鈥榯hem鈥�, and keep the sun shining on us.

But it doesn鈥檛 seem to work that way. As the poet Henry Vaughan writes, 鈥淭here is in God ... a deep but dazzling darkness鈥�.

So much of what we鈥檝e come to associate negatively with being in the dark - such as not knowing, or having the right answers; such as struggle, pain or loss - is very much of the part of the mysterious unity of the whole. And looking back to darker times in our life, we can often see that this is spiritually where we鈥檝e grown the most.

The 16th century monk John of the Cross, from within the depths of a prison cell, wrote eloquently of his 鈥榙ark night of the soul鈥�, and accepted it as a gift. As the clocks go back, I wonder if we can do the same with our winter darkness, as much as with the extra hour in bed.

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