But she would not, and in refusing to flee to quickly from the darkness, is eventually Elizabeth's redemption. Lewis Mumford tells of looking down an abandoned well when a young boy, down into the darkness, and being startled by something slithering away from the light, down there in the murky depths. Mumford said the thing that most startled him was that there were creatures in the world who actually preferred to live in such darkness their whole lives. There's a lot of darkness in the Bible, more than in a church at eleven on Sunday morning. Friend Job, in utter despair, mentions darkness three dozen times in his howling lament.
Darkness is like creation reversed.
I don't think that my church does well in the dark. We present the Christian faith as an exercise of reason, as a means of enlightenment for the illuminated. We are therefore more comfortable here at eleven in the morning, when the windows shine, and we can see where we're going, and all is smiling confidence in ourselves, oh yes, confident in God too. But we shall not be redeemed until we can face the night. Little children, old people, know enough of the dark not to go out much at night.