Darkness Never Sustains

“Darkness never sustains!” — Dr. Who (Thirteenth)



From the Daily Lectionary for Jan 7: Colossians 1:1-14

(1:13-14) “He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and relocated us in the realm of his beloved Child, in whom we have freedom— letting go of our fatal flaws.”

(My hodgepodge transliteration)



Lately, I’m all about using alternative words instead of the oh-so-familiar words from scripture that we all know— “Sin”; “Redemption”; “Son of God”; “Deliverance” and so on..

I usually get all involved in looking up the meaning of the Greek words in various sources, and also trying to sort out what the cultural context might have been of certain words.

Today I got hung up on the word “hamartia” which is usually translated as “sin” or “transgressions”. Those words have collected an odor of guilt and punishment, but I don’t think the word hamartia originally had that particular stink.

It was Aristotle who first used the word, in his book “Poetics”. He lived about 300 years before the Christ Event, and he was talking about classic Greek tragedy when he used hamartia to mean ‘the fatal flaw in the protagonist which leads to a tragic result.’

The verb form is hamartano, which means “to miss the mark” or “to fall short of a goal”.

According to Aristotle, when the audience of a play saw clearly how some character trait would inevitably lead to a certain choice; and that choice in turn would lead to an inescapable and unhappy result; they would feel pity and terror. Pity for the inevitability; and terror for the awful consequences.

Over on the Buddhist side, they say “moha” or “delusion”. Moha is defined as an ignorance of cause and effect or of reality that accompanies only destructive states of mind or behavior.

See?

It’s the ignorance which, when the audience sees it in the protagonist, creates that feeling of pity. They feel pity, because they are not ignorant of the cause and effect, and they feel like saying, “Oh, No!” I’ve done it, and so have you— watching a movie and saying, “Don’t do it…. Don’t DO it!” But then of course the hapless hero goes and does it, and we feel pity, and horror if it happens to be a good horror movie.



There’s a hidden implication here, though. The Colossians had to have figured out that there was something wrong. They must have had an inkling that their unexamined and unconscious choices were going to bring them to a tragic ending. It was that awareness that Paul was speaking to. He was telling them that they could open their eyes; that their practice of following Christ guaranteed them the freedom to let go of their fatal flaws.

Darkness is not always imposed from without; it can be the result of walking around with our eyes closed. In that case, all we need to do is awaken; open our eyes; and suddenly we are relocated into the Realm of Light.

And, when we’ve opened our eyes, suddenly we realize—

we are free of our fatal flaws, 
because those very fatal flaws resulted from nothing more than our own blindness.









Old Man Zen says,

“I close my eyes when I brush my teeth—ya think I oughta worry?”