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

by Barbara Brown Taylor

Continue to speak of them and you may be reminded that God will not let you be tested beyond your strength. All that is required of you is to have faith. If you still do not get the message, sooner or later it will be made explicit for you: the darkness is your own fault, because you do not have enough faith.

This cannot be rushed, no matter how badly you want to get where you are going.

Then they practiced letting me go alone, one of them calling out, “Have fun!” while the other called, “Be careful!” With those two good pieces of advice they helped me frame a personal history of darkness that allowed me to go places I might otherwise not have gone.

Phyllis Tickle says that we are in the midst of a great rummage sale that the Christian church holds from time to time.

Through it all, the timing remains pretty predictable. In Tickle’s terms, what many of us are taking part in, willingly or not, is Christianity’s “semi-millennial rummage sale of ideas.”3 The last one was called the Protestant Reformation. No one knows what to call this one yet.

Earlier I declined to define my terms, but Fowler does a good job of defining his. Religion, faith, and belief are not the same thing, he says, though we often speak of them as if they were. In the sixteenth century, “to believe” meant “to set the heart upon,” or “to give the heart to,” as in, “I believe in love.” But in the centuries following the Enlightenment, secular use of the words “belief” and “believe” began to change until they said less about the disposition of one’s heart than about the furniture in one’s mind. By the nineteenth century, when knowledge about almost anything consisted chiefly of empirical facts, belief became the opposite of knowledge.

The great pity of this conflation, Fowler says, is that when faith is reduced to belief in creeds and doctrines, plenty of thoughtful people are going to decide that they no longer have faith. They might hang on if they heard the word used to describe trust or loyalty in something beyond the self, but when they hear “faith” used to signify belief in a set formula of theological truths, the light in their eyes goes out.

“If you have understood, then what you have understood is not God,” Saint Augustine said in the fourth century. Sixteen hundred years later, the Northern Irish theologian Peter Rollins says the same thing with equal force. God is an event, he says, “not a fact to be grasped but an incoming to be undergone.”6

Since his sickness had brought him closer to God and his loved ones than he had ever been before, May said he finally gave up trying to decide what was ultimately good or bad. “I truly do not know,” he wrote. He died in 2005 at the age of sixty-four.

“I love it and surely would hate to lose it,” he wrote. “It’s the answer to a very long prayer. But I know it is not God. It is only a sense of God. I don’t think I make an idol of it, so I don’t imagine it will need to be taken away. If at some point I do lose it again, I hope I will be given the wisdom to continue to trust God in the absence of any sense of God.”

All I know is that there is no place I would rather be.

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. —Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude