Darkness

"Don’t Name Darkness Light"
We’re not waiting for the darkness to go away, brother and sisters. I’ve certainly worked long enough in ministry to know it won’t go away. We wish it would go away, especially in some of the great social issues. We wish world hunger would be eliminated. We wish we’d stop creating all these arms and killing people. But one has to surrender at a certain point and admit that the darkness is here. How do we deal with that? We’ve got to find the freedom within our spirits and within our communities to at least recognize that darkness and learn how to live in relationship to it. In other words, don’t name darkness light! Don’t name darkness good. I think many of our people have been seduced into doing that. The way out is to simply stop calling it OK. When we refuse to name darkness, we will be trapped by it. That’s dangerous and false innocence. When we can name the darkness, we can learn how to live so that the darkness does not overcome us. The problem of the liberation of the First World countries is that the edges between darkness and light in middle-class society have become very, very vague. When nothing is forbidden, nothing is required. We are close to that today. I believe it is what Thomas Merton predicted as “organized despair.”
from Preparing for Christmas With Richard Rohr

Question for my friends and readers: How do we do this? What things that should be named darkness have we learned to live with? What things that we call "OK" should not be tolerated? How can we step out of this and live in the light, while not denying that darkness exists? How can we proclaim Christ in the darkness around us?

My own preliminary list
1. Consumerism
2. Laziness
3. Anger
4. Turning a blind eye to....
5. Busy-ness

What's yours?