From Facts that Undergird Life by Paul Scherer (New York: Harper & Brothers: 1938).

THE FRIENDLY DARK
by Paul Scherer

I will give thee the treasures of darkness.
Isaiah 45:3

IF YOU have any imagination left in you at all after another week's experience of traffic lights and what-not; if the telephone, especially the dial-telephone, has overlooked a little something that's poetic in your soul, and allowed it to linger on; I think you will agree that this word of the prophet Isaiah is simply magnificent: "I will give thee the treasures of darkness." It doesn't mean what it says, in case anybody is prosaic enough to want to know what it means! God is promising Cyrus, king of Persia, all the hidden wealth of Babylon in return for the deliverance of Israel out of exile. That's the history—for curious people! But we shall not allow ourselves to be embarrassed by the facts! It's quite too striking a phrase, "the treasures of darkness," to have it go limping along under the burden of what it meant 2500 years ago. Let us give it wings for its feet!

Deep inside of us, I suppose, it has always been the light that we have thought of, instinctively, as friendly: we've never given the dark any real credit. Even the Bible doesn't. You will find that out if you look up the word. It has always stood for bewilderment, and hopelessness, and sin: the sweet and healing balm of it, its slow creative fingers away where seeds grow secretly in its womb—these things have never impressed us much. We are still prehistoric cavemen, and watch the sun go down with prehistoric shuddering, slinking into caves and building fires against our prehistoric enemy, the Dark!

It's very tragic, and very slanderous. A young mother once told me what she was doing about it, taking every evening her sixmonths'-old child in her arms up the steps, away from the light, that some day it might learn to reach out its hands in welcome to the friendly shadows,

The dark that's kind and silent.The
dark that's soft and deep;
The dark that smoothes the pillow,
And watches as men sleep.

"Our enemy, the Dark!" It's slander, you know. The grass knows it, on a thousand hills, burned all day by the sun, until it droops, weary and thirsty for the night again. David knew it, as the west turned crimson, then grey, and out across the plains of the sky marched the uncounted stars. It was only then that he sang, "When I consider the heavens, the work of thy fingers; the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him.... ?" There is a majesty from which the day would keep us. It has ever taken the falling of a mantle on the earth to reveal these other thoughts of God in the Universe beyond. Yes, we should have seemed quite alone without the night! Perhaps that's what's the matter with Broadway, Market or Main Street or Michigan Avenue; always, always day there, and the poor corners that keep waiting for the dark, and nobody can find anything, or God, in the glare of a million bulbs! "I will give thee the treasures of darkness." There's a sermon in it, I'm sure of that, whether it comes out or not! "The Friendly Dark."

Could we think of these last years in some such fashion, I wonder? If anything in this world ever wore the look of black and bleak disaster, they did! Frederick Allen, in his book "Only Yesterday" has written of them: a decade of jazz and sex, of crime and over-production, sport, and ballyhoo; until paralysis came, paralysis which we are unable even to diagnose, hunger in the midst of plenty, unemployment "in the face of an unparalleled need of the very commodities" which our "factories were clamoring to produce." "Ours is an age," wrote another, "that would stand condemned by all the foremost teachers and prophets from the beginning of history. Socrates would riddle it with scorn. Jesus would have none of it. Buddha—there is not one to whom it would not seem repellent and unclean." He was a brave man who talked of assets.

And yet—were they ever talked of more than through the last months or shall I say years of that grim experience? Wherever you turned there was some sober effort at appraisal; until smartness didn't seem so popular any more. I still remember reading in the midst of it all a book on psychology in which God and the soul came in for honorable mention! On the 3oth of December, 1931, after a long absence, sin was referred to in one of our great religious weeklies. "The experience of the past," it declared, "has given convincing proof of a mistaken estimate of human nature. We have made men believe that a little more education and another sermon or two on love would produce the kingdom of God." And somehow it seemed queerly refreshing, like the return of sanity to a mind that had wandered! Here, coming on down the list, was a daily newspaper, as it wrote its summary of that same year: "The gains of the last twelve months have been the gains of men who, suddenly bereft of the familiar reliances, turned with some earnestness to things that are not material. In deprivation, in suffering, in desperation, they have developed resources . . . neglected in softer times. There is not the slightest doubt that millions of chastened men and women survey with gratitude new domes and towers that fill in their mental and spiritual sky-lines." And that edition was sold out as soon as it reached the newsstands! "I will give thee the treasures of darkness." It isn't only optimism. In all earnestness, with a matter-of-fact sobriety, we may begin entering a few items at last on the credit-side of the ledger! Listen to another writing of the challenge that Life has thrown at our feet: "It is not security that develops the human spirit, but danger. Not in hours of placidity do men build a Chartres Cathedral, or paint the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, or write a constitution in Independence Hall ... Change is a phase of progress; decay is a prerequisite to growth ... If prosperity means only houses and furniture, automobiles and refrigerators, and no life that transcends them all, then let us pray that the blight may never return. A new adventure is beginning, a new search; perhaps, who knows?—a new Renaissance! We strike our tents!"

But all of that is in such general terms, and I want here to be specific. I want to take your life and get you to look at it. I want you especially to go peering about in its shadows. It's all very well to talk in large world-figures of the good that's been coming out of our wide and bitter discipline; but how about your case? Nobody has written any articles about that! And you wonder sometimes how long you can hold on, with the anxiety. Or perhaps it's some kind of bereavement, or illness somewhere, or disappointment; and the day isn't very much brighter than the night; it's all an indistinguishable grey!

So it is, if you sit down in it, and let it envelop you. Here comes God with his whispering: "I will give thee the treasures of darkness." And you wait there wondering when he's going to begin pouring them into your lap! Who wants to sit still in the dark, trying to put up with it, when all around there is wealth for the seeking?

In the dark, for the first time, a man may find his soul. You remember the story of The Blind Ploughman:

Set my hands upon the plough,
My feet upon the sod:
Turn my face then toward the East,
And praise be to God!

The God that made his sun to shine
Alike on you and me;
The God who took away my eyes,
That now my soul might see.

And the spiritual counterpart of it is in this description I came upon recently which a British man of letters gives of the career of one of his friends: "He had to bear a series of devastating calamities. He had loved the warmth and nearness of his home-circle more than most men, and the whole of it was swept away; he had depended for both stimulus and occupation upon his artistic work, and the power was taken from him at the moment of his highest achievement. But his loss of fortune is not to be reckoned among his calamities, because it was no calamity to him. He ended by finding a richer treasure than that he had set out to obtain; and I remember that he said to me once, not long before the end, that whatever others might feel about their lives, he could not for a moment doubt that his own had been an education of a deliberate and loving kind, and that the day when he realized that, when he saw that there was not a single incident that had not a deep and intentional value for him, was one of the happiest days of his whole existence. "I will give thee the treasures of darkness."

In the dark for the first time a man may find God. More discoveries have been made there by far than in the light. It was where George Matheson made his; after the love of a woman had loosened its hold: there, waiting, but never clearly seen before, the Love that would not let him go. "Come and find me," God seems to say, and lures us through to vision. And that faith, writes another, which we have found for ourselves in the darkness, is ours as no light-hearted, casual creed can ever be. "I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear," confessed Job, as he came up out of his long and darkly shadowed valley: "but now mine eye seeth thee." That night before the crucifixion, when bread was broken and a cup went round the circle, there was a presence in the room; clouds and thick darkness along all the ways of life, but peace here, and God! All through the deep and ominous shadows of a changing world, this one went with them; and down through the ages his saints salute us! You think life is hard, they say to us, and the way dark: reach out your hands as we did; God is there. In the day, we followed our sight: in the night we had to follow his; and we traveled farther in the night, and there was less stumbling. Jerusalem fell and was sacked. It seemed like the end. But we learned that the winds which blew were the winds of God. Heathen hordes poured in from the North, and we thought the world we knew would disappear, and the Church with it, and all our faith. But it was God's Dark. Again in the Reformation it fell; in the days of the French Revolution. There were upheavals without end, social, political, intellectual. Bewildered, are you? So were we, times any number. Good Companions in the life with Christ, courage! God is in the friendly Dark!

"I will give thee the treasures of darkness."

"Friendly Dark" did I say? Creative Dark—where seeds grow and God sets away his bulbs to flower!

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