CHO-shekh - darkness in Creation
earth & skies series
Baseball. I LOVE baseball. It is truly a great game. It’s also an odd game. For instance:
A strike isn’t when you hit the ball, but when you swing and miss. A steal isn’t taking a base with you, but leaving one behind. Hits are either fair or foul, instead of fair or unfair. It’s also a game of stats. It’s the only game where you’ll hear an announcer say something like: “And the fans will be happy to see Willie Turnbuckle coming to the plate, as he’s hitting over .400 during games in July when playing in the afternoon on the West Coast” (and he’ll be right!).
Baseball is a game that, once it’s in you, is in you. It’s a game so deeply in me that two years ago I started playing in an over-35 adult league.
They call the league Division 1 Masters. They do this solely for the players. One final stroke of the ego before hammy’s tear, backs explode, and we’re all put out to pasture one final time. The name almost kept me from signing up. I thought there was no way I could step back into the game at a “Division 1 Masters” level. I pulled up on our first day of training to discover two-thirds of our starting lineup having their “pre-training” beers and the other third taking a final drag of their cigarettes.
I was going to be just fine.
Only I wasn’t fine. Not at all. Well, I was fine playing the game, but it turns out my body hates me. I know this because it breaks down on me every chance it gets. This sad fact keeps me plunging into the at-home ice bath kit that Suz got me a few Father’s Days ago.
Ice Plunges. I know, I know. They’re everywhere these days. I am not one to jump on bandwagons. Anyone who knows me knows that I am whatever the opposite of a bandwagon jumper is…
a solo anchor sitter?
a one stump digger?
a single stockstill slumberer?
****
Moving on… (I could’ve done that for hours, by the way)
My first ice bath was around three years ago when my friend Tim invited me to join him down on the Gold Coast for one of his daily plunges.1 That experience was WILD, and though I have gotten way more used to the process of slowly sinking into that frigid water, the initial auto-pilot response is the same, which sounds something like:
OOOAAEEIIIIUUGGGGHHHHYAYAYAYAIEEEHIKKHAAWWAUGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Everything in me wants to shoot up and Wile-E.-Coyote-air-run across the water, diving safely under a heated blanket.
But, as I’ve learned to stay in the water and practice my deep breathing, I find the benefits actually outweigh the pain. I always leave the water feeling so much better than when I entered. My brain is clearer, I have more energy, and my muscles aren’t nearly as sore the next day.
The thing that you might know about me already, though, is that these freezing sits are doing more than just healing my sore body so I can head back out onto the diamond for next week’s game. As I am beginning to ritualise this practice, it’s bringing me face-to-face with PRESENCE and inviting me into something deeper - to find calm right there in what feels like insanity.
As I go just one click deeper, I can see just how quickly I tend to divert other areas of pain and discomfort in my life, replacing them with something that attempts to distract or soothe my restless soul.2
This ice bath, when ritualised, reminds me that pain - even really intense pain - can be seen from another lens, reframed so that we can begin to see its usefulness. It can become a teacher to be curious and engaged with more than an enemy we are meant to fight. You probably wouldn’t find me saying how “good” the experience is in the middle of it, and I don’t look forward to that moment of crossing the threshold between the air and the freezing water. But through practice, I’ve realised its purpose, and that, I would call good.
As you probably noticed in the weirdness of the title or straightforwardly in the sub-title, we’re still in the EARTH & SKIES series, and by now, you probably know what that means - CREATION STORIES, ANCIENT HEBREW, etc, etc, etc. And you’re right! Well done. Many points awarded to you.
The work I want to explore today and the role it plays in Genesis 1 ties into this icy experience I’ve been having lately.
Our word, “CHO-shekh”, is the Hebrew word for DARKNESS.
Darkness shows up very early in the Genesis 1 creation story. It is entwined in the wild and watery wasteland of tohu vavohu3, but it is worth its own post, so here we are.
Darkness is a major player in the mythology and lore of almost every ancient culture, particularly in stories about Creation - stories as widespread as the ancient Near Eastern cultures of Egypt, Uggarit, and Babylon to many Indigenous cultures such as Gamilaraay and Cherokee.
It’s no surprise, then, that we also find it at work in the early pages of the Bible. However, strange things are afoot here in Genesis 1.4
Rather than destroying or imprisoning the darkness, which we find in most other ancient myths, this God allows the darkness to exist.
The question worth asking at this point is “WHY?”. And you’d be right in asking the question. In all honesty, there is good reason to be deeply offended by this oddity.5 It’s very understandable to want a powerful, divine figure to simply rid the world of the darkness. If this God is seemingly so powerful - powerful enough to separate the chaotic abyss with an exhale, why would he not also blow the darkness right out of the water?
I remember reading the brilliant Franciscan Father, Richard Rohr, calling God “The Great Allower”.6 I struggled with this phrase for a while before realising that this is precisely accurate, despite our many feeble attempts of egoic control to try and keep God from “allowing”. We struggle with the idea of a God who allows darkness and suffering, and yet they wouldn’t exist if God hadn’t allowed them (it is worth noting that allowing is not the same thing as generating, which is something to reflect deeply on).
This “great allowing” of God felt disrupting and counterintuitive to my soul. If you’re anything like Ice Bath Phil, the most natural move is to arrange our life so that everything is positive and moving ever upward and to the right - more comfort and less pain, more success and less (of what we often name as) failure. Again, this is completely understandable. Who wouldn’t want the darker spaces of life to get exorcised, extracted, and eliminated?
I’ve noticed over the past few years that there is a growing number of people offering courses in ancient spiritual practices like prayer or meditation as a way to eliminate anxiety and stress. I think I understand what they’re aiming for when they say this, but I also think if we’re not careful, even our spiritual practices, faith systems, and traditions can become yet another way of bypassing the difficult and painful parts of life by promising a way of escape from them, as though God is a cosmic, “Get-Out-of-Life-Free” card.
However, it seems that reality (and the Divine Being holding it) just doesn’t work that way.
Culturally, we seem to struggle to engage discomfort, doubt, or struggle in a healthy way. We either try and avoid it at all costs—distracting ourselves, numbing the pain, or pretending it isn’t there—or we allow it to take over, letting anxiety, grief, or suffering shape our entire inner narrative.
We see these extremes exemplified in our consumption of media. Social media algorithms are finely tuned to give us exactly what we want—an endless stream of curated content reinforcing our preferences and distracting us from discomfort. Or, on the other extreme, they thrive on outrage, pushing the most polarising and inflammatory content to the top, leaving little room for nuance, reasonable disagreement, or gentle challenge. Rarely are we given space to wrestle with complexity—to sit with an idea that unsettles us without being forced to either embrace it fully or reject it outright.
But in Genesis 1, we see God holding this tension. He doesn’t eliminate the darkness, but he doesn’t call it good - He names it, sets boundaries for it, and places it within a larger story. Darkness simply is - part of the created order, existing before the introduction of light, holding space and potential. Some theological traditions can frame darkness as inherently evil, but Genesis suggests something more complex.
Darkness is not the opposite of God’s presence.
God often moves most profoundly in hiddenness, in the spaces we least expect, stirring and moving over those deep dark waters, drawing from them something beautiful and good.
This is where the work of spiritual direction can be so useful. Often, sitting with others in direction means exploring the difficult areas of faith, doubt, and struggle - not as problems to be solved or bypassed but as invitations to be encountered. When we stop resisting suffering as something to escape or explain away, we start to notice how it shapes us. We see that the very things we once viewed as obstacles might actually be openings. In my own journey and in the lives of those I sit with, I’ve seen this again and again -our struggles, if we let them, have a way of leading us home. Our journey into a deeper experience of Spirit often involves making room for and seeing our brokenness and limitations, not as something to be ashamed of but as the very place where transformation begins.
I’m learning something very fascinating sitting in my icy water. I’ve begun to realise that rather than my first instinct of resisting the pain, I can become curious about it instead. This mental shift almost instantly transforms my experience. I start to lean into the pain, instead of resisting it, viewing it with curiosity and even a hint of wonder: “Wow, the little toe on my right foot is really cramping right now. How interesting! I wonder what that’s about?”. What if, like in this ancient poem, we can learn to make room for the dark places in our lives, the pain, anxiety, difficulty, the areas of discomfort?
What if they, too, have a function, a meaning, and a purpose for existing? What if, instead of avoiding or trying to eliminate them, we chose to learn from them, as if they were our teachers, here to show us something important? What if we got curious about our anxieties and fears, or the thing that keeps us awake at night? What if we began interrogating these spaces of darkness to see why they’ve come to us and what they might be inviting us to see?
And to reiterate—I’m not suggesting that darkness is good in and of itself, or that suffering is something we should seek out. I’m also not saying that obsessing over suffering is any wiser than ignoring it. We can always take these ideas too far. But what if we were to begin learning to be present with the dark matter in ourselves—allowing it, giving it room, not with fear but with curiosity?
Because here’s the thing: if we can do that, if we can stay present even when it’s uncomfortable, we might just find that darkness holds more than we thought. Not as an enemy to be fought, or as something to be consumed by, but as a space where something real is being formed in us.
Genesis tells us that before the light was spoken into existence, before order was drawn from the deep, God’s Spirit was already there - hovering over the chaotic landscape, stirring in the darkness, moving over the waters. Maybe the invitation isn’t to escape the dark but to trust that God is right here and present in it.
Like the ice bath, maybe our first instinct will always be to resist - to flail, shout, and pull off a Looney Toons jump and run. But if we learn to catch ourselves, and learn to breathe through it? What if in the place we least expect, we might find God—not waiting on the other side of our suffering, but present within it, shaping us even here, even now?
What if darkness isn’t just something to endure—but something that transforms?
even as an Enneagram 4, someone who is not unfamiliar with or afraid of the painful bits of life, this propensity to avoid is deep in me.
another Hebrew phrase from an earlier post, which you can read about or listen to.
if you wondered if this was a reference to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, then WELCOME HOME, my friend. you are in the right place.
in my opinion, any religious tradition that doesn’t make plenty of room for shaking your fists at the heavens in frustration, confusion, and protest isn’t a tradition sturdy enough to withstand the reality of human life (and I believe this is the opinion of many writers of the scriptures - see, for example, a large portion of the library of psalms, lamentations, and the books of Ecclesiastes and Job).
Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013), 18-20.