The editor of this publication wasn’t exaggerating when he called 2025 “this frankly awful year”: Things are dark, and likely to get much darker.
Our politics nationally and here in Texas is now firmly in the grip of a narrow, petty tribalism that feeds on enmity. Each day brings new horrors; scrolling through social media inevitably becomes doom-scrolling. The loudest voices work to divide us, inflaming distrust, demonizing (sometimes literally) those who disagree and dehumanizing those regarded as different. Meanwhile, those seeking a more compassionate and just society seem feeble.
As our nation spirals into a nightmarish darkness, there’s an understandable temptation to despair—even as the work of compassion, justice, and solidarity is more urgent than ever. But how can we fend off that temptation, especially when it sometimes seems as if the darkness is all there is?
I, too, struggle with this question. One answer I’ve found in my work as a religion scholar is an affirmation common to several religious traditions. Precisely because it transcends religious boundaries, it can speak to all of us. It testifies—in the words of my own tradition, Christianity—to a light that “shines in the darkness,” a light the darkness cannot overcome, a light of compassion, beauty, justice, and love. The darkness, it says, is never all there is. Indeed, the light is closer than we realize.
Like Christianity, Hinduism attests to a light the darkness cannot overcome. In the annual feast of Diwali (reminiscent of Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights), Hindus celebrate the victory of light over darkness by lighting candles throughout their homes. As my Texas Christian University colleague Antoinette DeNapoli has explained, Diwali “celebrates the victory of goodness over evil, or truth over falsity, or knowledge over ignorance.” One need not be Hindu to appreciate setting aside a time each year to celebrate these values.
For its part, the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah points to sparks of infinite light scattered throughout the world. This teaching is rooted in the Kabbalists’ elaboration on the biblical creation story, according to which these sparks are “held captive within every object, every event,” as Tzvi Freeman writes. It is up to us to release them from their captivity through the work of “repairing the world”— tikkun olam—which includes acts of social justice, compassion, and kindness.
Again, one need not subscribe to the specific myth to appreciate the basic insight here. No matter how deep the darkness, sparks of light, beauty, and joy surround us—in, say, a baby’s smile, a lover’s touch, a refugee family’s safe arrival in a place of sanctuary, the first drops of rain on dry earth, a fragile monarch butterfly pausing its 3,000-mile migration to sip nectar from a blue mistflower. These simple beauties hint at a “more than” that transcends the ugly tribalism that consumes our current moment. “When we perceive beauty,” Freeman writes, “it is because we have found [a] window to the infinite.” When we let these joys radiate out in acts of kindness to all our fellow beings, we truly are “repairing the world.”
Perhaps we rejoice in these sparks of light because they reflect the light within each of us. Like recognizes like; light recognizes light. The Quakers speak of an “Inner Light” given to every person. This conviction anchors Quakers’ belief “in full equality among all people.” One Quaker site says, “Guided by the Light of God within us and recognising [it] in others,” we “learn to value our differences in age, sex, physique, race and culture.”
Buddhism, too, speaks of an inner light. In a process called “actualization of enlightenment,” one first “turn[s] the light inward so that we can find the Buddha we carry inside us. And then we turn this spiritual light outward so that we can see the Buddha in others.”
I’m not suggesting that these traditions are “all saying the same thing.” Each teaching is rooted in its religion’s own unique constellation of beliefs and stories. Yet they do appear to point to a common, perhaps deeply human, insight that the darkness of division, injustice, and ignorance cannot be all there is.
One need not subscribe to any religion to recognize and draw strength from this insight. The idea for this essay came to me during a visit this fall to Houston’s Rothko Chapel, which transcends religious boundaries and embraces people of all religions and none. Avowedly multifaith and ecumenical, it stands in stubborn protest against the divisiveness and hatred metastasizing across our nation.
I visited the chapel at a time when the darkness had become very personal. An outbreak of McCarthyist attacks on college faculty across Texas earlier this year resulted in firings for clearly political and ideological reasons, as well as threats and online harassment. I carried that with me as I entered the silent chapel.
Quite unlike the worship spaces of, say, Christianity or Hinduism or Buddhism, where one might find colorful, comforting images of gods or saints or buddhas, the Rothko Chapel offers the visitor “no bright color, no engaging form, no figure with which to identify,” as Carol Mancusi-Ungaro notes. Nor are there the airy, diaphanous “clouds” of color of artist Mark Rothko’s earlier work. One is instead confronted by darkness: Rothko’s oversize, flat panels, apparently featureless, somber, mute.
At first, all seemed uniformly black and forbidding. But as I sat before Rothko’s work, my eyes gradually adjusted to the daylight filtering down from the dome overhead. Subtle differences in color appeared: deep plum and rose, alongside the shades of black. Gossamer textures, too, began to reveal themselves, whispers of form and glimmers of light in what had first seemed impenetrably obscure. Even on the blackest panels, an evanescent shimmering of the filtered daylight played across the surfaces.
When one sits long enough to let Rothko’s panels speak in their own way, they truly do, as art historian Barbara Rose writes, “seem to glow mysteriously from within.” But they require us to take the time to “stop and see” (as the Buddhist tradition says). They reveal their light only when illumined by our own Inner Light. In this way, Rothko’s panels testify to that which religious traditions also reveal.
I came away from the chapel feeling a kind of quiet joy—and energized to carry on the work of compassion, justice, and solidarity.
The lesson I took is simple: Persist; don’t despair. The darkness is never all there is.
This is not blithe optimism. (“Just look on the bright side!”—give me a break.) Realistically, we cannot expect relief from divisiveness, hatred, and tribalism anytime soon; they’re too deeply embedded in our politics and culture, and they’re far too toxic to ignore.
Yet that doesn’t negate the deep truth to which the religions and Rothko’s murals point: There is a light the darkness cannot extinguish. And it is all around us and within us. Our job is to keep doing the work of tikkun olam, repairing our broken world, by recognizing and releasing those sparks of light, of beauty, of joy, wherever and whenever we find them. To carry on the struggle—that’s our job.
For, after all, we are the light in the darkness.
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