Chaplain Lesley Machon: The Dark Between Flames

By Lesley Machon

(Calgary) – As a child, I was terrified of the dark. Each night, light from my bedside spilled across the floor of the moonlit hallway, and my closet doors glowed orange as they kept imagined monsters shut away.

Turning out the lights and plunging the world into darkness was a threatening task. I regularly opted out.

Now, as a Jewish community chaplain, I find myself thinking differently about the dark. When I try to trace this shifted relationship in my memory, I land on an evening mangrove tour in Costa Rica several years ago. As dusk settled, our boat meandered along the waterways, the nocturnal wildlife emerging with eyes reflecting our flashlight beams. Above us, the stars brightened and crystallized like sugar across the sky. Below, the strokes of my paddle stirred up the bioluminescent plankton, swirling and rippling, scattering blue-green sparkles in the inky water.

This darkness wasn’t obfuscating or empty, nor was it threatening. Instead, it was glowing, abundant. It made the stars easier to see. It made the world more glittery and electric.

What I saw and felt in those mangroves reminds me of what Rabbi Fern Feldman teaches about sacred darkness, or what she describes as “depths, womb, soil where seeds sprout, soothing shade, night in which we grow and make long-term memory. Darkness is source, essence, innermost being, transcendence, nothingness, emptiness, mystery.” When we dismiss darkness, Feldman argues, we devalue everything associated with it, from dark skin to women to the earth itself. We might risk forgetting how many of the Torah’s revelations take place in the sanctuaried darkness of caves.

Feldman’s framing invites us to reconsider everything we’ve been taught about safety and reflection. So often, we’re told to “bring things to light.” But some things need time in the dark to grow properly. Seeds need to ready themselves in the soil before they grow, relationships require conflict before they can deepen, and creative work must brew before it’s poured. Cut a butterfly from a cocoon too early, and it may never develop the wing strength to fly.

In her essay “Museum of Color,” Stephanie Krzywonos describes how the cave paintings at Font-de-Gaume depict reindeer in bone-black charcoal markings that were likely drawn with pigment made from reindeer bones. To create this pigment, you have to “remove all of an animal’s fat, muscle, and tendons from the bones, then roast them in high heat while starving them of oxygen.” This conceptualization of darkness as the source of our earliest marks, our first attempts to capture the world and make meaning from the stuff of it, has stayed with me. To capture darkness has its roots in an act of destruction and devotion, of carefully, lovingly, even ritualistically extracting to honour and preserve.

Biologists and ecologists will know this inherent tension of the dark well. Artificial light pollution has disrupted nature’s rituals because many plants measure not daylight but night-length, using darkness to determine when to flower, fruit, or enter dormancy. Strawberry plants need darkness to produce fruit, but streetlights near farms have caused harvests to dwindle. Confused plants leaf out instead. Dung beetles, too, navigate by starlight, moving in straight lines to avoid predators. Without access to the night sky, they scatter into chaos, losing their way.

Just as dung beetles lose access to their Milky Way map, we can lose sight of our hurt and our healing. In an attempt to stave off heavy feelings, we end up dimming our own light, turning away from the world and failing to see so many glimmers of joy that can only glow in the dark. Just like the stars above Costa Rica’s mangroves, the chanukiah’s flames are more vivid in a dark room.

This Hanukkah, as we incrementally kindle flame after flame across the season’s longest nights, I want to linger on the miracle that precedes the light, the one we habitually forget in our rush toward the safety of what’s easier to see. Before that small pot of olive oil was lit, another miracle had already occurred precisely because the oil was still there. It had remained intact and sealed, hidden in darkness across years of desecration. Rabbi David Seidenberg reminds us that “Darkness is not opposition to light—it is what allows light to appear, to shine.”

As a chaplain, I spend time in Calgary’s hospitals and hospices, sitting with people facing diagnoses, grief, and end-of-life transitions. In my work, I sit with people in their darkest hours.

This sitting-with, a refusal to rush toward light without drinking in the fullness of the dark, is so necessary, and it changes us irrevocably. To be present in a crisis isn’t to arrive with solutions or platitudes about silver linings but to trust that something needs to be reckoned with, and that process would be interrupted, slowed, even damaged, by a too-swift, premature illumination.

Afterwards, what matters most isn’t whether we can restore what was but whether we can remain present with what is. In the dark, we find the smatterings of wisdom, love, hope, and reassurance we may need to latch onto for the rest of our lives.

As an adult, it’s not always easy for me to avoid bouts of sadness during this wintry season. I am extraordinarily grateful to have rabbis, friends, family, fellow chaplains, and a family doctor (forever and always thankful, Dr. O), who are willing to sit with me in the dark, who don’t immediately reach for a switch when I’m struggling, who trust that the nights of my days deserve their time to be tended. This is what community care looks like; it’s the holding that allows someone to fall apart safely.

The eight nights of Hanukkah unfold across this season, and there is darkness between each new flame. We turn to rhythm, ritual, and a gentle accumulation of light against the turning year. Meanwhile, the pot of oil survived because someone had the foresight to seal it carefully, trusting the protective cloak of darkness.

This Hanukkah, perhaps we can let the flames outline the darkness rather than cut through it. In doing so, we might remember that the oil itself was the first miracle, that we all have reserves we wouldn’t know existed were it not for the dark.

Lesley Machon is the JFSC Community Chaplain. If you would like a phone call or a visit,  email her at lesleym@jfsc.org