Sunrise

To be honest, when I look back over the past two years, it feels as if some lights that once burned brightly in my life have been greatly dimmed or altogether extinguished. The loss of light is a useful metaphor for all kinds of other losses. And in this difficult period, I lost work, home, community, religion, friends, and love, among other things. I share this reflection with you not to elicit pity, but because I suspect that some of you know a similar feeling yourselves. You know what it feels like for a certain darkness to creep in where once there was light. You know why the metaphor of darkness speaks to the experience of loss.

For nearly thirty years, I saw my ministry in the church as work that was intended to keep light burning in the face of encroaching darkness, and to advance the mystical narrative of the light that shines in the darkness, but the darkness cannot overcome it. I was grateful that I’d been given gifts to keep the lamps burning (as the old spiritual puts it), during a time in the life of the church when it seemed a lot of lamps were growing dim. Although the church no longer wants any part of me, I still want to advance this gospel narrative; I still feel called to do so. I am hoping that I am becoming a yet more reliable narrator since I have seen and felt and known a more profound impingement of darkness in my own life. (Rejection and exile have well established places in both the Jewish and Christian narratives; I have some good company.)

One of the reasons we seek out stories is to find the ones that resonate with our own experience, but that are different enough to help us see our own lives more clearly. I was surprised recently to find my attention gripped by a discussion of the Frankenstein oeuvre, which has never especially spoken to me before, when I listened to an interview with the maker of the most recent Frankenstein film, Guillermo del Toro.

In this film version it becomes clear that the creature that Frankenstein has made is indestructible, he cannot be killed. But the creature’s invincibility brings him no peace; far from it. Speaking about this aspect of the film, del Toro talked about both life and death in what reads like an astonishing paragraph in the transcript of the interview, in which he also refers to the kidnapping of his father, who was once held for ransom for 72 days.

I'm a groupie for death. I think it's the metronome of our existence. And without rhythm, there is no melody, you know? It is the metronome of death that makes us value the compass of the beautiful music, you know? I'm going to say, this comes - when my father was taken, every day was torment, and I used to see the sun rising and resent it. And I said, the sun doesn't care about my pain. But then eventually, I realized it was my pain that didn't care about the sun and that I needed to change that, that I needed to accept it. I needed to understand that the rhythm of the cosmos is different than that of my little heart, you know? (Guillermo del Toro speaking to Terri Gross on “Fresh Air,” WHYY, 23 Oct 2025)

This is the voice of a man who has felt the eclipse of the light in his life by a threatening shadow; and it’s insightful in the way it places his personal darkness within the context of the cosmic reality of life and death. This is a religious perspective.

More to the point, he speaks to anyone who knows what he means when he says that he resented the rising sun, and thinks to himself, “the sun doesn’t care about my pain.” For this is exactly the kind of thing we tell ourselves when we are feeling sorry for ourselves. The sun rises in all its beauty and all its power, but we cannot feel, or do not notice its warmth and its light.

But… “then eventually I realized it was my pain that didn’t care about the sun.” Here is the crucial observation or discovery: it’s not that the sun has become indifferent to me, but that I have become indifferent to the sun. And I need to change! I realized that it was my pain that didn’t care about the sun.

At the beginning of this year I had a small epiphany in which it occurred to me that for nearly two years I have been carrying with me a heavy load of sadness that has affected every day, every relationship, every interaction, every outlook of mine. I would not characterize this experience as depression - it has not been sufficiently clinical, if you ask me. The load I have been carrying has simply been one of sadness - which was a generally unfamiliar burden to me - brought on by all the loss, all the darkness I have experienced. And when I thought to myself, “I can’t continue to live like this,” I realized that I was wrong, that actually, I could continue to live while carrying a heavy burden of sadness with me everywhere I went. I needed to come to the realization that I don’t want to live like this. I need to change. I need to put the sadness down, and decide that I don’t want to carry it with me everywhere anymore.

The idea that death is the metronome of our existence is a metaphor that needs its own examination; I won’t try to address it here, but I didn’t want to unravel that remarkable paragraph of del Toro’s, and I think his insight about death is worth paying attention to.

But I want to underscore again his beautiful self-knowledge in recognizing that he could see the sun rising and resent it. In many ways, religion is intended to address this human experience, which we could probably call a tendency to provide the mechanisms of our own eclipses. Religion is meant to facilitate the transformation from suspecting that the sun doesn’t care about my pain to realizing that it’s my pain that doesn’t care about the sun, and then to turn me toward the healing light and the warmth of the sun.

Such is the gospel that I have preached for thirty years. And although I now know firsthand that religion frequently accomplishes, sometimes by design, the precise opposite of that life-giving journey, I have not stopped believing that God is always calling us to see that it’s not that the sun doesn’t care about our pain, it’s that our pain has given up on the sun. “The rhythm of the cosmos is different than that of my little heart, you know?”

It strikes me as profoundly good news to be wrenched from the sad suspicion that the sun doesn’t care about my pain into the hopeful recognition that my pain has not cared about the sun, because it is also a realization that the sun is still shining, and that light really will overcome darkness, because the sun is going to rise in the morning. I believe that this conviction is also a concise statement of the Gospel of Jesus, and I am counting on it being true. Faith remains true even when religion fails.

I was not expecting to find encouragement in the vicinity of Frankenstein’s creature, but there you have it. And I am still working on setting down my sadness; it gets easier when you realize that that’s your task. And I am remembering the promise that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.

Guillermo del Toro