Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

by Barbara Brown Taylor

It did not matter whether the window was in Kansas, Ohio, Alabama, or Georgia. Dark was dark, and she wanted her children inside. It must have cost her a lot to call us, since it meant that the quiet house

Without benefit of maturity or therapy, I had no way of knowing that the darkness was as much inside me as it was outside me, or that I had any power to affect its hold on me.

Did I have enough faith to explore the dark instead of using faith to bar all my doors?

Chief among these is the way Christian teaching thrives on dividing reality into opposed pairs: good/evil, church/world, spirit/flesh, sacred/profane, light/dark.

So I wrote a book in which I focused on spiritual practices rooted in ordinary, physical, human life on earth, like going for a walk, paying attention to a tree, hanging a load of laundry on the line, and treating other people

like peepholes into God.

Since I have spent at least half my life in churches, I am especially aware of how many old-time Christians are looking into the dark right now. Attendance is down; debt is up. Plenty of smaller churches are closing or at least putting