To Be A Witness Of Darkness by Margit Ilgen

To Be A Witness Of Darkness

Margit Ilgen

To go in the darkness with a light

Is to know the light.

To know the dark go dark.

Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too,

blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet

and dark wings.

Wendell Berry^[1]

I am a psychotherapist, and I work for a company called Lumen Health and Psychological Services. Lumen means Light. And our website says indeed: “Lighting the way to mental health.”

I am deeply grateful for the work I do with my clients, ranging from eighteen to ninety-five years old, because I see again and again the light within them and the strength and love with which they work through dark forces in their souls and dark periods in their lives.

Before I begin my work, I light my candle held by a little angel and pray that Christ will be in my heart when I meet my clients. My angel is darkened, and it misses one wing. That is what I love about it: It has been in the trenches, and it knows the dark, Still, it holds the flame.

But in this article, I want to talk about darkness! Because the without avoidance, without right away listing what we need to do, without right away telling each other how we can find the light again.

Before all that, I want to witness the darkness.

“I Just Want to Tell My Story”

I have a fifty-three year-old man as a client who came to therapy not long ago, not with a problem or something to change. And he did, every session he told seven years of his life.

And I became a witness to the most horrible childhood I have ever heard, leading him to being on the street with no parents at fifteen years old. He survived through crime (breaking into cars and selling drugs), because that was the only thing he had learned. At eighteen he ended up in a Level 4 state prison where he shared his cell with murderers and serial killers until he was released when he was thirty years old. He told me in detail about his life in prison. He told me that he was thin when he came in, and he weighed 315 pounds when he came out. It is called Hate Weight. He said that he looked like a monster and showed me his picture.

However, this “monster” turned his life around, became a counselor and helped the children who went through the same as he went through. He raised three wonderful children as a single father.

Before our sessions, I showed him the notes I took from the previous session. They were several pages long. This gave him great joy, because he felt that his story was witnessed; it was there for him to see.

The DIgnity of the Human Being

There is another client I want to tell you about. He is a thirty-nine year-old man, who came to therapy because of many years of exposure to what is called vicarious trauma (the trauma of other people). He worked as a young man in Guatemala, then in the United States in a center for children who came unaccompanied to America. Later he worked in a border town in Mexico with asylum seekers, and now in the United States with asylum seekers, especially from the LGBTQI community.

In our last session he told me about the raids in Bakersfield, where undocumented farm workers were picked up out of the field by the border patrol and put into detention centers. He told me that they leave families behind, and it is uncertain that they get out and the families do not know if, and when, they get out.

This brings us to the daunting realization of the refugees in our country, many of whom could soon have to leave, and the millions and millions of refugees all over the world.

The Darkness of Our Own Soul

We also may be a witness of the darkness in our own soul. It can be deep.

I write this because I truly believe that we must see first in full wakefulness, before we can hope to change anything.

I write because, somehow, I know that

I know that, in some images, the angel Michael does not look at the dragon which he holds under his feet. I wonder how that would be now, in our time, when Michael has changed his gesture to a beckoning and transforming movement. What does he see?

When I was a child, I always wanted to work in a circus. And one time when I was about seven years old we watched the circus show and then my father took me behind the screens and I got to talk to the lion tamer himself.(I always loved to look at the lions.) He told me that, to work with the lions, he would watch them for hours and hours when they were little cubs. He would especially look at what they liked to do, and that is where he began his training. Then, the first thing he would teach them was where their place was, which of the little high platforms in the ring was their own and that became their safe place.

Whenever unrest came or a threatening situation, he would direct them to their place, and they became calm.

Perhaps we can witness the darkness and then give it a right place.

Compassionate Witness

In my field there is the term: Compassionate Witness.^[2] It is well known that we all need a compassionate witness in our life.

We might think of the Christ as our Compassionate Witness.

We also hope to be a compassionate witness of each other.

I believe that

O Christ,Thou knowest

The souls and spirits

Whose deeds have woven

Each country’s destiny.

May we who today

Share the world’s life

Find the strength and the light

Of Thy servant Michael.

And our heart be warmed

By Thy blessing, O Christ,

That our deeds may serve

The healing of peoples.

Adam Bittleston^[3]

(Both clients described in this article gave permission to write about them.)

Margit Ilgen grew up in the Netherlands, where she worked in an Anthroposophical Community for People with Alcohol and Drug problems. She did her Speech and Drama training in Dornach, Switzerland, and came to the USA in 1993 to work with therapeutic and artistic speech at Rudolf Steiner College and Raphael Medical Centre in Fair Oaks, California. She received her license as a psychotherapist in 2008 and is an active Member of the Christian Community in Fair Oaks. margit11@comcast.net.

^[1] Wendell Berry, “To Know the Dark,” in Soul Food Nourishing Poems for Starved Minds, edited by Neil Astley and Pamela Robertson-Pearce. Bloodaxe Books, 2007.

^[2] Kaethe Weingarten, Common Shock: Witnessing Violence Every Day - How We Are Harmed, How We Can Heal (Dutton, 2023).

^[3] Adam Bittleston. Meditative Prayers for Today, sixth ed. (Floris Books, 1982).

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