‘The Far-spent Night’: Advent Meditation 2018
“The night is far spent”
There are degrees of darkness. There is the literal darkness of the night in the twilight of the year. There is the metaphorical darkness of civilizations and cultures in their decay and disarray. There is the social and economic darkness of communities and families in their distress and dismay. There is the darkness of institutions when they betray their foundational and governing principles. There is the darkness of souls in psychological confusion: distraught, anxious, angry and fearful. The “far spent night” is the hour of deepest darkness. There is the darkness of the fear of death.
In one way or another, they are all forms of spiritual darkness. They all belong to the darkness of sin and doubt, the darkness of death and dying, the darkness of despair. The darkness of despair is the deepest darkness, the darkness of the “far spent night” of the soul, the darkness of darkness itself, as it were. Why? Because it is the darkness of denial. Despair is the denial of desire. It signals the rejection of the possibilities of light, of faith; the rejection of the possibilities of hope, of what is looked for; and the rejection of the possibilities of love, of what is embraced in the knowing delight of what is good and true, of what is holy and beautiful, of what is true and good.
In the oldest literary work known to our humanity, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero, Gilgamesh, is changed in his soul and outward aspect by the loss of his friend, Enkidu. He sets out on a search for everlasting life; it is really a quest for wisdom, for he knows, and we know, that is his destiny is not everlasting life but kingship and mortality. He is mortal and has to come to terms with his mortality. Wisdom is found in the embrace of the limitations of our knowing.
He undertakes the first of the great spiritual journeys of our humanity in terms of literature, which, of course, is where all the great journeys are to be found. He journeys to find Utnapishtim to ask him“concerning life and death.” Utnapishtim is the Noah figure of the much older story of the flood contained in The Epic of Gilgamesh. He has been granted everlasting life and has survived the flood, the flood which was intended to wipe out the human nuisance and yet threatened the gods, too. They “cowered like curs” beside the wall of the city of Uruk. But where is Utnapishtim? At the end of the world and beyond the end of the world, we might say, all alone except for his wife, unnamed and unknown. We may ask what kind of immortality this is.