God's Holy Darkness: The Theologies of Light and Dark

As the people of God, we are called to disrupt thinking that marginalizes and excludes others. We are people called to dismantle systems that harm and perpetuate racism, sexism, ableism, and more. This includes calling out harmful ideas of binary thinking around light and dark. In this talk we discuss the harmful Christian tradition of lightness over darkness.  This thinking is a result of white-centered-Christianity.  The Bible teaches us that darkness should bring us into places of wonder and awe. Night is a time to find rest and be comforted. But often, scriptures like John 1:5 (“The light shall shine in the darkness and the darkness shall not overcome it”), have been manipulated. Instead of understanding literal light and dark, qualities of “good” and “bad” have been applied to them. Within the construct of race, this has been detrimental to the fourishing of back and brown folks among us. We need to call out our own embedded, learned, couscous or subcoucious racist spiritual language. And deconstruct our understanding of darkness. Pointing us to a refreshed and beautiful picture of God’s holy darkness.