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

by Barbara Brown Taylor

Instead, I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.

darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day.

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

I cannot remember the last time I heard anyone use “dark” to describe something good.

To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and rising up. To want a life with only half of these things in it is to want half a life,

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?

our comfort or discomfort with the outer dark is a good barometer of how we feel about the inner kind.

Darkness turns out to be as essential to our physical well-being as light.

What, then, shall we make of the human determination to light the night—to shrink the amount of darkness in our lives and our world to the point that all creation suffers from our inventiveness?

Better than that, what if I could learn how to stay in the present instead of letting my anxieties run on fast-forward?

A bed, in short, is where you face your nearness to or farness from God.

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.

I learned that sadness does not sink a person; it is the energy a person spends trying to avoid sadness that does that.

feelings do not happen only in the brain. They happen in the feet, the hands, the shoulders, and the skin, kicking up sparks in the dark interior of the body before they ever make it to the resolution center in the brain.

Nights like that taught me the importance of letting emotions flow—even the loud and messy ones—because if they are kept from making their noise and maybe even tossing the furniture, they can harden like plaque in a coronary artery, blocking anything else that tries to come through.

I could not see the light of the world anymore. Yet the light was still there.”

We come to see what is here and to discover who we are in the presence of what we find.

Everyone who saw the risen Jesus saw him after. Whatever happened in the cave happened in the dark.

Resurrection is always announced with Easter lilies, the sound of trumpets, bright streaming light. But it did not happen that way. If it happened in a cave, it happened in complete silence, in absolute darkness, with the smell of damp stone and dug earth in the air.

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.

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

No one chooses the dark night; the dark night descends.

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.

The only thing the dark night requires of us is to remain conscious. If we can stay with the moment in which God seems most absent, the night will do the rest.

I have courted the Beloved long enough to know what it is like to receive a divine visit: it is like coming home after a long time away; it is like being held by someone with all the time in the world; it is like remembering a dream that opens a door.

How many times since then have I rejected Love because it did not present itself the way I expected, in a form acceptable to me?

Nowhere does it say that light is good and darkness is bad.

Is it dark out tonight? Fear not; it will not be dark forever. Is it bright out tonight? Enjoy it; it will not be bright forever.

If I want to flourish, I need the ever-changing light of darkness as much as I need the full light of day.

We are all so busy constructing zones of safety that keep breaking down, she says, that we hardly notice where all the suffering is coming from.