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

by Barbara Brown Taylor

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.

All in all, the moon is a truer mirror for my soul than the sun that looks the same way every day. After I stopped thinking that all these fluctuations meant something was wrong with me, a great curiosity opened up: what would my life with God look like if I trusted this rhythm instead of opposing it?

some of the best things that have ever happened to them have happened in the darkest places, and some of the worst in well-lit churches;

even when light fades and darkness falls—as it does every single day, in every single life—God does not turn the world over to some other deity.

here is the testimony of faith: darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day.

we decided to haul anchor and move someplace where we could be on more intimate terms with the moon in all her seasons. If this does not sound important to you, I am not sure I can explain it.

Plus, there is something promising in the cycles of the moon—now you see her, now you don’t—for those who are more than halfway through what feels for all the world like a linear life with a period in view.

When the compressor for the air conditioning in the house turns on, I feel apologetic. I had no idea how loud it was out here, clearly interrupting a whole valley full of creatures that are trying to say something to one another.

she has a large interior life.

Let There Be Night,

I learned how dangerous darkness really was—not the kind under my bed or in the dark woods but the kind the Bible said was in my own heart.

Anyone who knows the story of Abraham remembers the night God led him outside to look at the stars.

“Count the stars, if you are able,” God said to Abraham, for “so shall your descendants be.” It was not something that could have happened in the middle of the day. The night sky was a key player in Abraham’s decision to trust God.

Once you start noticing how many important things happen at night in the Bible, the list grows fast. Jacob wrestles an angel by a river all night long, surviving the match with a limp, a blessing, and a new name. His son Joseph dreams such dreams at night that he catches a pharaoh’s attention, graduating from the dungeon to the palace to become the royal interpreter of dreams. The exodus from Egypt happens at night; God parts the Red Sea at night; manna falls from the sky in the wilderness at night—and that is just the beginning.

It is an entirely unnatural darkness—both dangerous and divine—that contains the presence of the God before whom there are no others. It is so different from what other Hebrew words mean when they say “dark” that it has its own word in the Bible: araphel, reserved for God’s exclusive use.

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.

The Cloud of Unknowing,

“I form light and create darkness,” God says through the prophet Isaiah,

What would Moses say to people who feel free to ask God for good weekend weather and safe travel to away games?

nyctophobia, our fear of the night.

A friend of mine says he turns over and over in bed when he wakes up like this, until he has all the bedclothes wrapped around him like a bandage. One night his wife tried to get some of the covers back, yanking at them and telling him to go back to sleep. “I can’t.” he whispered. “I think it’s God that’s bothering me.” “Well, God’s not bothering me,” she said, “so get up and pray, but do it somewhere else.”

I am too consumed with the things that must be done to consider whether or not doing them even matters.

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.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see. —Theodore Roethke

“If you have understood, then what you have understood is not God,” Saint Augustine said in the fourth century.

I hope I will be given the wisdom to continue to trust God in the absence of any sense of God.”9