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

by Barbara Brown Taylor

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?

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.

One of the main things that tip people toward garden-variety depression, she says, is a “low tolerance for sadness.” It is the inability to bear dark emotions that causes many of our most significant problems, in other words, and not the emotions themselves.

much of what passes for spiritual teaching in this country is about consoling the self, not losing it. Translation is being marketed as transformation, which is why those who try to live on the spiritual equivalent of fast food have to keep going back for more and more. There is no filling a hole that was never designed to be filled, but only to be entered into.