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.

I have been given the gift of lunar spirituality, in which the divine light available to me waxes and wanes with the season.

All in all, the moon is a truer mirror for my soul than the sun that looks the same way every day.

“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.2

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

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.

In this view, the best thing to do when fear has a neck hold on you is to befriend someone who lives in real and constant fear. The best thing to do when you are flattened by despair is to spend time in a community where despair is daily bread. The best thing to do when sadness has your arms twisted behind your back is to sit down with the saddest child you know and say, “Tell me about it. I have all day.” The hardest part about doing any of these things is to do them without insisting that your new teachers make

you feel better by acting more cheerful when you are around.

After years of being taught that the way to deal with painful emotions is to get rid of them, it can take a lot of reschooling to learn to sit with them instead, finding out from those who feel them what they have learned by sleeping in the wild...

The salvation of the psyche begins with its own demise.

Where real transformation is concerned, Wilber says,

“the self is not made content; the self is made toast.”

Maybe that is the difference between pastoral counselors and spiritual directors.

This is often a sly way of staying in control of the situation, since the possibility that you have caused it comes with the hope that you can also put an end to it, either by passing the test or by enduring the punishment.

While

The new age we are living in is the Age of the Spirit, Cox says, already well under way in the global South.

that the dark night is God’s best gift to you, intended for your liberation. It is about freeing you from your ideas about God, your fears about God, your attachment to all the benefits you have been promised for believing in God, your devotion to the spiritual practices that are supposed to make you feel closer to God, your dedication to doing and believing all the right things about God, your positive and negative evaluations of yourself as a believer in God, your tactics for manipulating God, and your sure cures for doubting God.

All of these are substitutes for God,

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. We

become more curious about your own darkness.

Blessing the day means accepting my full quota of light and of dark, even when I cannot see what I am blessing.