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.

At the theological level, however, this language creates all sorts of problems.

it offers people of faith a giant closet in which they can store everything that threatens or frightens them without thinking too much about those things. It rewards them for their unconsciousness, offering spiritual justification for turning away from those things, for “God is light and

How much more was in store for me if I could learn to walk in the dark? This

that the days of their lives are not easily divisible into good and evil, spirit and flesh; that 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;

Step 1 of learning to walk in the dark is to give up running the show. Next you sign the waiver that allows you to bump into some things that may frighten you at first. Finally you ask darkness to teach you what you need to know. If you have never had a spiritual director before, you have started near the top. Let this one guide you, and you will soon have new companions as brave and curious as you are about the nightlife of your soul.

There is a divine presence that transcends all your ideas about it, along with all your language for calling it to your aid, which is not above using darkness as the wrecking ball that brings all your false gods down—but whether you decide to trust the witness of those who have gone before you, or you decide to do whatever it takes to become a witness yourself, here is the testimony of faith: darkness is not dark to God; the night

Once I decided to explore lunar spirituality,

resolved to follow darkness wherever it led,

According to the rabbis, the Sabbath begins when three stars are visible in the sky, in which case I am not there yet. As it turns out, there is a lot of ground to cover between one sunset and three stars.

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?

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

possibility of making poor decisions for their patients.7 The divorce rate of night workers is 10 percent higher than the national average.8 The risk of breast cancer rises 50–70 percent for women who work night shifts.9

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.

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. Eruptions are good news, the signal that darkness will not stay buried. If you can stand the upsetting energy, you may be allowed to watch while dark and light come back into balance.

In this way, Lusseyran learned that he was not a poor blind boy but the discoverer of a new world, in which the light outside of him moved inside to show him things he might never have found any other way.

The light dwells where life also dwells: within ourselves.9

I have become a believer. There is a light that shines in the darkness, which is only visible there.

compose music. Yes, but how? I gave up making choices. In their place I put the asking of questions.”1

I will give up making choices for a while and let asking questions take its place.

Sitting deep in the heart of Organ Cave, I let this sink in: 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.

When the dark night first falls, it is natural to spend some time wondering if it is a test or punishment for something you have done. 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. The darker possibility—that this night is beyond your control—is often too frightening to consider at first, at least partly because it means that none of your

every dark night of the soul involves wrestling with belief.

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.

their images of and ideas about “God” are in fact obstacles between them and the Real Thing.

cannot say for sure when my reliable ideas about God began to slip away, but the big chest I used to keep them in is smaller than a shoebox now. Most

Through it all, the timing remains pretty predictable. In Tickle’s terms, what many of us are taking part in, willingly or not, is Christianity’s “semi-millennial rummage sale of ideas.”3 The last one was called the Protestant Reformation. No one knows what to call this one yet.

“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

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, John says.

Yes, the soul suffered from fearful subtraction. Yes, a great emptiness opened up where I had stored all my spiritual treasures, and yet. And yet what? And yet what remained when everything else was gone was more real than anything I could have imagined. I was no longer apart from what I sought; I was part of it, or in it. I’m sorry I can’t say it any better than that. There was no place else I wanted to be. God puts out our lights to keep us safe, John says,

we can stay with the moment in which God seems most absent, the night will do the rest.

sense of God’s absence can be a token of God’s presence if I let it. Because

dark night of spiritual treasure to explore. Although I am not Catholic, I am devoted to Mary. Part of it is that she is a she; the other part is that she is entirely human. Most of the time I think she understands me better than her son does, since she has a whole DNA spiral and a body that operates on a lunar cycle—or did. Even if she has left that part of her life behind now, as I have, she remembers what it was like to fill like the moon every month and then to empty. She knows what it is like to go through this routine diminishment

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

the cathedral gift shop to buy the silver medal with Our Lady of the Underground on it. All must come through me in order to live in the light. She has been talking to me ever since.

“The soul does not grow by addition but by subtraction,” wrote the fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart.

all the while weighing a bag of Christian certainties that had less in it all the time.

Chief among these is the strategy of spiritual bypassing, which markets faith in God as protection from every kind of darkness. Walk as a child of the light, the advertisement reads, and all your nights will be bright as day.

The real problem has far less to do with what is really out there than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there. The suffering comes from our reluctance to learn to walk in the dark.1

become more curious about

What are you afraid is going to happen to you, and what is your mind telling you to do about it?

What have you learned in the dark that you could never have learned in the light?

With limited time left on this earth, I want more than the top halves of things—the spirit but not the flesh, the presence but not the absence, the faith but not the doubt. This late in life, I want it all.