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

by Barbara Brown Taylor

“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.

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. When I go out on my porch at night, the moon never looks the same way twice. Some nights it is as round and bright as a headlight; other nights it is thinner than the sickle hanging in my garage. Some nights it is high in the sky, and other nights low over the mountains. Some nights it is altogether gone, leaving a vast web of stars that are brighter in its absence. All in all, the moon is a truer mirror for my soul than the sun that looks the same way every day.

If there is any truth to the teaching that spiritual reality is divided into halves, it is the truth that those pairs exist in balance, not opposition.

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.

here is some good news you can use: 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. Even when you cannot see where you are going and no one answers when you call, this is not sufficient proof that you are alone. 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 is as bright as the day.

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.

“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

those of us who wish to draw near to God should not be surprised when our vision goes cloudy, for this is a sign that we are approaching the opaque splendor of God. If we decide to keep going beyond the point where our eyes or minds are any help to us, we may finally arrive at the pinnacle of the spiritual journey toward God, which exists in complete and dazzling darkness.

If darkness really does bring such phantoms out of hiding, I think that is because the bright distractions of daytime have come to their natural end. When the sun goes down, it is time for another natural thing to happen, as the slower, quieter, and more tactile rhythms of nighttime open doors that remain shut during the day. No doubt there are frightening things behind some of those doors, but there are also stunning things. Eventually, with some practice, one learns that all these doors open on the same room. “I form light and create darkness,” God says through the prophet Isaiah, “I make weal and create woe.”

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?

Darkness is necessary to our health. Without enough of it, we make ourselves sick with light. Worse than that, we take all creation with us, making the whole planet pay for our fear of the night.

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people. —Carl Jung

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

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 wilderness that those who sleep in comfortable houses may never know.

One function of Christian faith, for instance, is to offer believers a new way to translate their hardships. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” In these beatitudes, spiritual poverty and grief are moved from the “loss” side of the ledger to the “gain” side, enabling those who suffer to view their hardships as blessings.

This function of religion does not sell well, Wilber says, because it does not locate the human problem in the spiritual shortfall of the world. It locates the problem in the spiritual grasping of the self, which is always looking for ways to improve its own position. In popular American usage, Wilber says, “soul” has come to mean little more than “the ego in drag,” and much of what passes for spiritual teaching in this country is about consoling the self, not losing it. Translation is being marketed as transformation, which is why those who try to live on the spiritual equivalent of fast food have to keep going back for more and more. There is no filling a hole that was never designed to be filled, but only to be entered into. Where real transformation is concerned, Wilber says, “the self is not made content; the self is made toast.”

If you’ve read my writings on religion & spirituality, you know I don’t think you can separate the two — at least in their true meanings. But Wilber brings up a real point here in the false projections of religion; particularly in the North American context. The importance for those with disabilities to be conscious & aware of this truth is to recognize a significance of holistic embodiment in our identity. We cannot treat religion as a “way” for self healing; particularly within the world definition. We must seek and see our physical and psychological embodiment, as a transformational journey to be lived through & not necessarily overcome through our own understanding.

The problem with seeing the regular way, Lusseyran wrote, is that sight naturally prefers outer appearances. It attends to the surface of things, which makes it an essentially superficial sense. We let our eyes skid over trees, furniture, traffic, faces, too often mistaking sight for perception—which is easy to do, when our eyes work so well to help us orient ourselves in space.

In January 1944, the Nazis captured Lusseyran and shipped him to Buchenwald along with two thousand of his countrymen. Yet even there he learned how hate worked against him, not only darkening his world but making it smaller as well. When he let himself become consumed with anger, he started running into things, slamming into walls, and tripping over furniture. When he called himself back to attention, the space both inside and outside of him opened up so that he found his way and moved with ease again. The most valuable thing he learned was that no one could turn out the light inside him without his consent. Even when he lost track of it for a while, he knew where he could find it again.

A truth that anger towards our disabilities compounds the struggles we face. Embracing the challenges with love give new pathways to freedom in overcoming challenges; and barring through them. Love thyself, as you love thy neighbor.

Hurd had written about this twilight zone in her book. It is where cave dwellers and cave strangers meet, though some can go no farther out and some can go no farther in—or at least not for long. I was one of the cave strangers, whose eyes are not adapted to darkness and who cannot live on the food a cave provides, but who are drawn to caves for our own reasons. Bears come to hibernate and give birth, bats and frogs to escape the heat, raccoons and skunks to take shelter from the weather. Why do humans come? That is harder to say. We come to see what is here and to discover who we are in the presence of what we find.

The difference between the therapy and the cave is that the therapy wants me to look back so I can find another way out, not so I can return by the same way I came. Maybe that makes the cave more like a labyrinth. As long as you stay on the path, you cannot get lost—in time, maybe, but not in space. The path is circular. The way out is the way in. The path, like the cave, never changes. It is literally set in stone. Only the walker changes, not by looking back but by moving ahead, trusting the path to teach her what she needs to know.

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. 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 I entered the cave hoping for a glimpse of celestial brightness, it never occurred to me that it might be so small. But here it is, not much bigger than a mustard seed—everything I need to remember how much my set ideas get in my way. While I am looking for something large, bright, and unmistakably holy, God slips something small, dark, and apparently negligible in my pocket. How many other treasures have I walked right by because they did not meet my standards? At least one of the day’s lessons is about learning to let go of my bright ideas about God so that my eyes are open to the God who is. Wild or not, God is a cave I do not want to miss.

While the dark night of the soul is usually understood to descend on one person at a time, there are clearly times when whole communities of people lose sight of the sun in ways that unnerve them. This seems to be what is happening to a lot of church people right now, especially those in denominations that are losing members at an alarming rate. While they experiment with new worship styles and set up Facebook pages, most of them know that the problem runs deeper than that. The old ways of being Christian are not working anymore, not even for those who are old themselves. Something in the ways has died, or is dying—truly cause for great sorrow, even among those who know the time has come—and yet at the same time something is being born. Many people refer to the new ways as “emerging Christianity,” though there are so many varieties of it that it defies description. The one thing most emerging Christians will say is that the faith they inherited from their elders is all worn out.

We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light. —Hildegard of Bingen