In 1990, when I was a child myself, Richard Marx released the song “Children Of The Night” as the sixth and last single from his unfortunately-titled “Repeat Offender” album [1]. The song was recorded and released to help out a Southern California-based not-for-profit organization that has been working for about 35 years or so to help keep at-risk runaway children who have suffered abuse and abandonment. When I heard the song first, as part of a greatest hits album collection, I was struck by the fact that although the song and my life were not in perfect congruence (I have never been called a mistake by my parents or sold my body to survive), a lot of the song rings painfully true to my own experience, as it would with any other person who grew up as a survivor of child abuse. It is the sort of experience that deeply shapes a life, and leaves one wondering when one will be finished doing one’s time in hell.

When I was in my mid 20’s, I wrote a play called Dark Night Of The Soul. The hero of this play, which was part of a several-play series involving the religious wars of Germany in the 16th and 17th centuries, was a decent and upstanding man with a strong passion for justice and fairness in his dealings with others, and a place in the Catholic hierarchy of the Tridentine counter-reformation Roman church, except his support of justice had made him some powerful enemies. Additionally, he had one particularly vulnerability that led to the torment that fills that tragic play. In many ways, it is more than a little painful to reflect on the fact that my life at present resembles the anguish suffered by a character I wrote about a few years ago because of the precise vulnerability that I wrote about at that time. It is immensely frustrating to be living out one of one’s worst nightmares, and to have seen it coming in a sense as a possibility but to still have to deal with it, hoping that real life is not as tragic as one’s creative fiction. There are of course, some differences, given the lack of such relationships or such a search for relationships in my life (as opposed to the play), but that is small comfort in the face of teasing and anguish in this present dark night of the soul.

The Bible speaks often of the metaphorical nature of night in our lives. Exodus 12:12 (and it is not the only place that does so), shows the night as the time when God executes judgment: “For I will pass through the land of Egypt on that night, and will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the Lord.” At other times, as in Luke 18:7, night is used to describe how persistent God’s people are at praying to him about deliverance from our troubles: “And shall God not avenge His own elect who cry out day and night to Him, though He bears long with them?” At other times, night is used to show concealment of one’s actions from prying eyes, as in John 3:2: “This man [Nicodemus] came to Jesus by night and said to Him, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.” Jesus Himself spoke of the nighttime metaphorically in John 9:4 as the time when no work could be done: “I must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day; the night is coming when no one can work.” He also spoke, slightly later, in John 11:10, of the sort of stumbling that happens when people walk in the darkness: “But if one walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.”

These do not exhaust the references that the Bible makes to night, but from these it is clear that night is a matter of some importance to God. Whether we use the darkness to say those things that we are not (yet) willing to say in the light out of fear, or whether nighttime is where we are awoken with terrors that spring from the horrors we have experienced and the immense anguish of our anxieties and stress, or whether we stumble because of the darkness that envelops us, the nighttime is a time where fears and terrors seem to run most free. Yet it is also a time of refreshment, of relaxation, of sleep that is supposed to allow the mind and body to rest and recuperate from the busy labor of the day. We could all use the refreshment that can come when what has been created by God for good is not corrupted and exploited for the purposes of wickedness. Some people know the suffering of that all too well.

[1] See, for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Night_%28Richard_Marx_song%29

The music video for this song can be seen here:

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/the-road-to-heaven-runs-through-miles-of-clouded-hell/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/03/09/book-review-highway-to-hell/