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

by Barbara Brown Taylor

You would have to ask an anthropologist how well this childhood history matches the history of the human race, but when I look around the world today, it seems clear that eliminating darkness is pretty high on the human agenda—not just physical darkness but also metaphysical darkness, which includes psychological, emotional, relational, and spiritual darkness. What do I mean by “darkness”? I guess that depends on what color your monsters’ eyes are. Most people do not know what they mean by “darkness” except that they want to stay out of it.

For now, it is enough to say that “darkness” is shorthand for anything that scares me—that I want no part of—either because I am sure that I do not have the resources to survive it or because I do not want to find out. The absence of God is in there, along with the fear of dementia and the loss of those nearest and dearest to me. So is the melting of polar ice caps, the suffering of children, and the nagging question of what it will feel like to die. If I had my way, I would eliminate everything from chronic back pain to the fear of the devil from my life and the lives of those I love—if I could just find the right night-lights to leave on.

Christianity has never had anything nice to say about darkness. From earliest times, Christians have used “darkness” as a synonym for sin, ignorance, spiritual blindness, and death. Visit almost any church and you can still hear it used that way today: Deliver us, O Lord, from the powers of darkness. Shine into our hearts the brightness of your Holy Spirit, and protect us from all perils and dangers of the night.

The first time you speak of these things in a full solar church, you can usually get a hearing. Continue to speak of them and you may be reminded that God will not let you be tested beyond your strength. All that is required of you is to have faith. If you still do not get the message, sooner or later it will be made explicit for you: the darkness is your own fault, because you do not have enough faith.

So I wrote a book in which I focused on spiritual practices rooted in ordinary, physical, human life on earth, like going for a walk, paying attention to a tree, hanging a load of laundry on the line, and treating other people like peepholes into God.

If you are my age, you are losing a lot more things than you once did—not just your keys and your vision, but also your landmarks and your sense of self. You are going to a lot more funerals now than before. When you read your class notes in the alumni news, they are shorter and nearer the top every time. You know full well where all this is heading, but you also know that you are not ready yet. So how are you supposed to get ready? What is the work you have left to do before you enter the Great Beyond? Clearly, it is time for a walk in the dark.

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.

It is always night somewhere, giving people the darkness they need to see, feel, and think things that hide out during the day.

each of us has a personal history of the dark. A child who was locked in a closet as punishment will not register darkness the same way as a child who looked forward to family camping trips. A child who grew up in an urban housing project will fear things worse than coyotes when she bolts her doors at night. As universal as darkness may be, our experience of it is local. It is also social, cultural, economic, and political, since our relationship with darkness is never limited to what we have personally sensed or intuited about it. We have all been taught what to think about the dark, and most of us only have to think a minute to come up with the names of our teachers.

It was not until I explored the God option on my own that 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.

There are only about a hundred references to darkness in the Bible, but the verdict is unanimous: darkness is bad news. In the first testament, light stands for life and darkness for death. When God is angry with people, they are plunged into darkness. Locusts darken the land. People grope in the dark without light, for the day of the Lord is darkness and not light. In the second testament, light stands for knowledge and darkness for ignorance. “If thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness,” Matthew says in the King James

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. When I took my first course in Christian mysticism at the age of nineteen, I learned to call this the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—the terrible and fascinating mystery of God—which exceeds human ability to manage it in any way. “This darkness and cloud is always between you and God, no matter what you do,” wrote the anonymous fourteenth-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing, “and it prevents you from seeing him clearly by the light of understanding in your reason and from experiencing him in sweetness of love in your affection. So set yourself to rest in this darkness as long as you can, always crying out after him whom you love. For if you are to experience him or to see him at all, insofar as it is possible here, it must always be in this cloud and in this darkness.”

The people who were awake at night were different from the people who were awake during the day. They knew things the day people did not know, like what kinds of injuries you see most often on the graveyard shift at the emergency room, or how many people leave personal items on their desks at work, forgetting that the night maintenance crew will be coming through later in the evening.

All these years later, I like to think that I learned as much about human nature waiting tables at Dante’s as I did writing papers for my seminary professors. One happened in the dark and one happened in the light, but together they offered me a better education in the mysterium tremendum than I could ever have gotten by attending just one of them. Later, when I stood in front of an altar waving incense, I would remember standing in front of the bar at Dante’s waving cigarette smoke out of my face, and the exact same feeling of tenderness would wash over me, because the people in both places were so much alike. We were all seeking company, meaning, solace, self-forgetfulness. Whether we ever found those things or not, it was the seeking that led us to find each other in the cloud even when we had nothing else in common. Sometimes I wondered if it even mattered whether our communion cups were filled with consecrated wine or draft beer, as long as we bent over them long enough to recognize each other as kin.