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Six decades ago I was in graduate school while half-a-million young people my age were at war in Vietnam. A certain general kept assuring us he saw light at the end of the tunnel. In a seminar, I read Theodore Roethke’s poem that begins, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” I’ve been haunted by that line all year, waiting for the light.

There was a glimmer of it in June at the first “No Kings” rally in Saint Paul. But I took so many photos that my iPhone died just as the rally ended. I stood among thousands of strangers wondering how I would call for a ride home. The rally ended earlier than planned. Overnight a man with guns and a grudge had assassinated state Rep. Melissa Hortman, murdered her husband Mark and their dog Gilbert, attempted to murder state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette. Organizers were worried we might be the next targets.

I looked up from the useless iPhone in my hand to see my good friend Mary standing a few yards away — with a phone that I used to call for my ride home. Her appearance felt a bit miraculous.

In a few days, I was back at the Capitol for a vigil to honor the lives of those we had lost. As we assembled on the lawn, we were handed candles to light — and light again and then again as the breeze snuffed them out. At twilight the candles began to sustain small, flickering flames that grew more intense as darkness deepened. In a world turned upside down, it seemed as if stars were coming out among us rather than in the sky above.

The Hortman’s children asked not for vengeance but for people to do an act of kindness to honor their parents’ commitment to service.

Then in late August, a desperately unhappy young person shot into Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, murdering two children and injuring 29 other people at a morning mass, then killing himself. Annunciation is in our neighborhood. I was running errands that morning about halfway between our house and the school when four police vehicles shot past on the wrong side of the road, lights flashing, and disappeared into a sea of other flashing lights four blocks ahead at the school. I learned later that adults had raced toward the gunfire, and children had shielded other children. 

This month, two gunmen shot into a crowd of Australian Jews gathered on the first day of Hanukkah. They killed 15 of the worshippers. A Holocaust survivor died shielding his wife. A vendor nearby wrestled the rifle away from one gunman — and then laid the gun on the ground. That good Samaritan was Muslim.

Festivals of light cluster around the winter solstice. As the dark hours grow longer, we string bulbs on evergreens for Christmas; we light menorahs for Hanukkah and kinaras for Kwanzaa.

One recent morning I awoke at the usual time — in darkness, of course — and was astonished to see an enormous, bright white moon seeming to rest on top of the evergreen trees behind the houses across the street. I have never before seen a moon so large, so low, so bright, and so apparently close. But by the time I got downstairs to alert my wife (who always rises before me) the moon had disappeared behind the trees and houses. As if it were after all a dream, a mirage, a miracle.

“I meet my shadow in the deepening shade,” the poem continues. An ancient, savage instinct compels us to meet darkness with darkness: hate with hate, violence with vengeance.

The poem haunts me, perhaps, because it seems to give primacy to darkness, as if it necessarily comes before the light. Candles are invisible in sunlight — as is the moon. Yet, though invisible, the candle still burns and the moon is still out — waiting for a darker time to shine.

On the solstice, “the darkest evening of the year,” sunlight begins edging its way slowly across the thresholds of dawn and dusk. On Christmas Day, the light will last one minute longer than it did on the solstice.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

David Miller, a retired business training developer, has lived in the Twin Cities since 1966. He earned a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Minnesota and has been on the board of Clean Elections Minnesota since 2017.

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