Darkness is of course a necessary and natural part of living on this world.  Some of our darkness is natural, that is, the nighttime or the shorter days of winter.  Some is unnatural, for instance, the pains and sorrows of our lives or the various geological and meteorological disasters that afflict the human species.  Either way, we find it--or it finds us.
     In his The End of Night, author Paul Bogard describes his quest for "natural" darkness, a darkness that is away and apart from any semblance of artificial light.  He writes that in this era of ubiquitous and programmable light, such darkness is exceedingly difficult to find.  Most of us, I think, would agree.  We are overwhelmed with light.
     It's odd, isn't it?  We like the ease of light, artificial or not, but in our Western surplus of illumination we may be missing what is more fundamental to our experience.  If there were no darkness, what would it mean to have light?
     "God is light," the apostle John (1 John 1:5) writes, and in him "there is no darkness at all."  Perhaps we should not actively seek intellectual or emotional darkness, but perhaps we should also understand that without such darkness we would not know what light can and could be.  As the first three verses of Genesis note, in the beginning "darkness" was on the face of the deep, the earth--until (and only until) God "spoke" light.
     There's no darkness without light.