Awakening to Wholeness is a series of prompts, reflections, and teachings about how holding the tension of opposites can help us to heal division and experience wholeness. If you feel moved to share your own reflections, we invite you to email us with the subject line “Wisdom of Opposites” or tag us on social media with #EHoPWisdomOfOpposites.
The sun and moon are both bodies of light, but we experience their effects in distinct ways, marked by the rhythms of day and night. One of my favorite exercises in recognizing the multiple ways of knowing is to reflect on our experience of sunlight and moonlight knowing.
Imagine how you perceive the world when you walk outside on a sunny day. In sunlight knowing, the world appears clearly and defined. We can distinguish objects from one another and compare things easily. Boundaries are well-defined and certainty about what and where things are, abound. We might associate sunlight knowing with rational, cognitive knowledge.
Imagine now, how you perceive the world when you walk outside at night. In moonlight knowing, we can still see, but objects are less clear and not well defined. That could be a bush or a bear over there. Unknowing and uncertainty abound in moonlight knowing. We might associate moonlight knowing with intuitive and affective knowledge. Compared to the clear, defined, linear ways of knowing in sunlight, moonlight knowing is mysterious, unboundaried, and circular.
Generally, our biases lean toward popular assumptions that the ease and control that come with sunlight knowing are preferred ways of knowing. However, such assumptions are not always true, for there are many times when facing tensions and the unknown are preferred ways of knowing: for example, facing the death of a loved one, or the terror of the unfathomable abuse and cruelty that exist among persons.
We tend toward similar biases as we assess our experiences of darkness and light. At the social level, we only need see the devastating history of racism and colorism to recognize common cultural preferences for lightness and darkness. At the spiritual level, we observe a similar distaste for the discomfort that often accompanies the “dark times” of our lives.
It is important to correct our often lopsided preferences for the light. In the case of skin color, we see that “too much white” leads to problems such as white supremacy. In the case of the spirit realm, we can see that too much light can blind or burn us. Darkness, in both is physical and spiritual expressions is a gift.
Warmth, vitality, fecundity, new life, are all gifts that require both the dark and the light to come into fruition. Think of the life cycle of a seed that begins in the dark, moves toward the light, and returns to the dark. This ancient pattern is found in the natural world, and in Christian theology as the Paschal Mystery. As we travel the spiritual path, may we know the luminosity of both the light and the dark!
Contemplative Questions
We offer the following questions as prompts to help you reflect on the presence of opposites in your spiritual practice and your life.
- Think of something you know in a sunlight way, or a subject you think about in a sunlight way: rational, cognitive, clear. How does this way of knowing feel? What are its gifts?
- Now think of something you know in a moonlight way, or subject you approach in a moonlight way: mysterious, affective, intuitive. How does this way of knowing feel? What are its gifts?
- Do you have a tendency to lean on one way of knowing over the other? How do you embrace both dark and light?
Join the conversation! If you feel moved to share your reflections, we invite you to email us with the subject line “Wisdom of Opposites” or tag us on social media with #EHoPWisdomOfOpposites.
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Christine Luna Munger
Christine Luna Munger, PhD currently serves as the director of the Episcopal House of Prayer. She previously served as Coordinator of the Spiritual Direction Certificate and Professor of Theology at St. Catherine University. She regularly writes, teaches, and leads group prayer sits at EHoP.
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