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

by Barbara Brown Taylor

When biblical writers speak of “the fear of the Lord,” this is what they mean: fear of God’s pure being, so far beyond human imagining that trying to look into it would be like trying to look into the sun. When I took my first course in Christian mysticism at the age of nineteen, I learned to call this the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—the terrible and fascinating mystery of God—which exceeds human ability to manage it in any way. “This darkness and cloud is always between you and God, no matter what you do,” wrote the anonymous fourteenth-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing, “and it prevents you from seeing him clearly by the light of understanding in your reason and from experiencing him in sweetness of love in your affection. So set yourself to rest in this darkness as long as you can, always crying out after him whom you love. For if you are to experience him or to see him at all, insofar as it is possible here, it must always be in this cloud and in this darkness.”