Bridges
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At age 19, out on the tenuous bridge from life as a Mormon to something yet unknown, I dreamed of apocalypse. A brilliant and transfixing glow lit up the eastern sky over the backyard of the house where I’d grown up in Utah, the light of the sun vanished, and I found myself in the dark.
Darkness shows up often, and unfondly, in Mormon belief. For example, most people will reach, after appropriate penance, some level of Mormon heaven. But there’s a place called Outer Darkness reserved for Satan and his angels, and for those blighted human souls who gain a literal face-to-face knowledge of God—beyond need of faith—and then deny him.
In Book of Mormon scripture, darkness appears in a pivotal dream:
And it came to pass that there arose a mist of darkness; yea, even an exceedingly great mist of darkness, insomuch that they who had commenced in the path did lose their way, that they wandered off and were lost.
Separately, the church founder Joseph Smith recalled, as a youth, wrestling with a great evil in the moments before God first appeared to him: “Thick darkness gathered around me and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction.…”
To a conflicted college sophomore with this background in appraising darkness, making his way out of the familiar light of belief might have seemed all menace. But it didn’t, because the other thing about the dream was that, after the light went out, I could still see. This was a surprising realization; it made the dream mainly hopeful.
I would eventually read, in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets:
A good many have figured God as light, but a good many have also figured him as darkness. Dionysius the Areopagite, a Syrian monk whose work and identity are themselves shrouded in obscurity, would seem to be one of the first serious Christian advocates of the idea of a “Divine Darkness.” The idea is a complicated one, as the burden falls to us to differentiate this Divine Darkness from other kinds of darknesses—that of a “dark night of the soul,” the darkness of sin, and so on. “We pray that we may come unto this Darkness which is beyond light, and, without seeing and without knowing, to see and to know that which is above vision and knowledge through the realization that by not-seeing and unknowing we attain to true vision and knowledge,” Dionysius wrote, as if clarifying the matter.
Bridges—to return to today’s topic, lol—accomplish an inversion on the order of true vision that comes by not-seeing. What was there is now here. They, too, seldom do so in a way that leaves one’s perception continuously intact. You lose sight of the shore you’re leaving, or a suspension tower blocks the Empire State Building. The bridge is an occlusion or a warp as well as a conveyance; it places you on unfamiliar terms. Those of us who are in some kind of transition—so, in some color or degree, all of us—can find comfort in the place that was built to be between.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.