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

by Barbara Brown Taylor

“Courage,” he writes now, “which is no more than the management of fear, must be practiced. For this, children need a widespread, easily obtained, cheap, renewable source of something scary but not actually dangerous.” Darkness, he says, fits that bill.

how do we develop the courage to walk in the dark if we are never asked to practice?

a Cappadocian monk named Gregory of Nyssa was the first to see Moses’s cloud as a cipher for the spiritual life. “Moses’s vision began with light,” he wrote. “Afterwards God spoke to him in a cloud. But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect, he saw God in the darkness.”2

darkness is not a synonym for mortal or spiritual danger,

To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety

and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and rising up.

Continuation

when we run from darkness, how much do we really know about what we are running from? If we turn away from darkness on principle, doing everything we can to avoid it because there is simply no telling what it contains, isn’t there a chance that what we are running from is God?

Compelling thought

The God of Moses is holy, offering no seat belts or other safety features to those who wish to climb the mountain and enter the dark cloud of divine presence. Those who go assume all risk and give up all claim to reward. Those who return say the dazzling dark inside the cloud is reward enough.

it is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.

What if I could learn to trust my feelings instead of asking to be delivered from them? What if I could follow one of my great fears all the way to the edge of the abyss, take a breath, and keep going? Isn’t there a chance of being surprised by what happens next? Better than that, what if I could learn how to stay in the present instead of letting my anxieties run on fast-forward?

Whether you are in pain or not, whether you are an anxious person or not—even, I think, whether you are a religious person or not—a bed is where you come face-to-face with what really matters because it is too dark for most of your usual, shallowing distractions to work.

Some of us have even gotten the message that if we cannot do this on schedule, we may not have enough faith in God. If we had enough, we would be able banish the dark angels from our beds, replacing them with the light angels of belief, trust, and praise. Greenspan calls this “spiritual bypassing”—using religion to dodge the dark emotions

instead of letting it lead us to embrace those dark angels as the best, most demanding spiritual teachers we may ever know.

It is the inability to bear dark emotions that causes many of our most significant problems, in other words, and not the emotions themselves.

Dark denotes bad here

There are no dark emotions, Greenspan says—just unskillful ways of coping with emotions we cannot bear. The emotions themselves are conduits of pure energy that want something from us: to wake us up, to tell us something we need to know, to break the ice around our hearts, to move us to act.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,” Carl Jung wrote,

“but by making the darkness conscious.”3

There is no filling a hole that was never designed to be filled, but only to be entered into.

Mind blown! I must enter the God sized hole, not merely want God to heal the hole

Where real transformation is concerned, Wilber says, “the self is not made content; the self is made toast.”4

Vision requires very little intimacy.

Jewish German philosopher Martin Buber—“The only way to learn is through encounter”—Heinecke

Heinecke references Buber

sight naturally prefers outer appearances. It attends to the surface of things, which makes it an essentially superficial sense.

Hence, least intimate of the senses

too often mistaking sight for perception—which

The most valuable thing he learned was that no one could turn out the light inside him without his consent.

If we could learn to be attentive every moment of our lives, he said, we would discover the world anew.

I always wondered why it took “three days” for significant things to happen in the Bible—Jonah spent three days in the belly of the whale, Jesus spent three days in the tomb, Paul spent three days blind in Damascus—and now I know. From earliest times, people learned that was how long they had to wait in the dark before the sliver of the new moon appeared in the sky. For three days every month, they practiced resurrection.

Jesus was born in a cave and rose from the dead in a cave. Like most Westerners, I always thought of the stable in Bethlehem as a wooden lean-to filled with straw, at least until I went to the Church of the Nativity in the West Bank. There I learned that caves made the best stables in Jesus’s day—no wind whistling through the boards, no predators sneaking up on you from behind. The traditional place of Jesus’s birth is not in the Church of the Nativity but under it, in a small cave under the altar.

new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.

they let me explore my own cave. Maybe that is the difference between pastoral counselors and spiritual directors. We go to counselors when we want help getting out of caves. We go to directors when we are ready to be led farther in. I hope I can remember that the next time someone comes to me with a cave problem. The way out is the way in.

How do we differentiate the type of problem?

While I am looking for something large, bright, and unmistakably holy, God slips something small, dark, and apparently negligible in my pocket.

One of the central functions of the dark night, he says, is to convince those who grasp after things that God cannot be grasped. In John’s native Spanish, his word for God is nada. God is no-thing. God is not a thing. And since God is not a

thing, God cannot be held on to. God can only be encountered as that which eclipses the reality of all other things.

Karen Armstrong says that we are living through a time of global transformation, when religions around the world are taking stock of what enmity has cost them and turning toward some new wisdom about what it means to be fully human.2

Doctrines and creeds are no longer enough to keep faith alive. Instead, the faithful seek practical guidance and direct experience of the sacred.

Fowler

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,

No one asks, “On what is your heart set?” No one asks, “What powers do you most rely on? What is the hope that gives meaning to your life?” Those are questions of faith, not belief.

“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

God puts out our lights to keep us safe, John says, because we are never more in danger of stumbling than when we think we know where we are going.

Amen

this sounds like a fifth Gospel, in which the good news is that dark and light, faith and doubt, divine absence and presence, do not exist at opposite poles. Instead, they exist with and within each other, like distinct waves that roll out of the same ocean and roll back into it again. As different as they are, they come from and

I am not convinced the divine is ever absent. Not to say, "I always hear," but to say, "I'm not always listening."

return to the same source. If I can trust that—if I can give my heart to it and remain conscious of it—then faith becomes a verb, my active response to the sacred reality

Before the invention of the lightbulb, almost no one slept eight hours at a time. That is a modern convention, made possible by an abundance of artificial light. In the long centuries before the advent of electricity, people spent as much as fourteen hours of every day in the dark, which affected their rest as well as their activity.

darkness was not created; it was already there, so God’s act on the first day of creation was not to make light and darkness but to make light and separate it from the darkness, calling the light “day” and the darkness “night.”

If this primordial story of separation plays a role in our problems with darkness, that is because we turn it into a story of opposition by loading it with values that are not in the story itself.

“Easter Day is always the Sunday after the full moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox on March 21, a date which is fixed in accordance

with an ancient ecclesiastical computation, and which does not always correspond to the astronomical equinox.”1

Easter comes on a different day every year.

it may occur anywhere from March 22 to April 25, never falling on the same day two years in a row.

Sancta Camisa, brought to Chartres by Charles the Bald in 876. According to sacred legend, it is the shawl worn by Mary while she was giving birth to Jesus.

do I want the kind of light that shines on things or the kind that shines from them?