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

by Barbara Brown Taylor

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

Carl Jung

By day, I am a servant of the urgent.

main purpose of

a bed is for making love, beds are where you commune with your own heart (Psalm 4:4), get chastened with pain (Job 33:19), meditate in the night watches (Psalm 63.6), and water your couch with tears (Psalm 6:6). A bed is where you beget children, give birth, pray, dream, weep, languish, and die.

There are no dark emotions, Greenspan says—just unskillful ways of coping with emotions we cannot bear.

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

sadness that does that.

The sorting was so automatic that it had not required any conscious effort at all.

If you can stand the upsetting energy, you may be allowed to watch while dark and light come back into balance.

What such people stand to discover, Greenspan says, is the close relationship between “individual heartbreak and the brokenheartedness of the world.”

“Tell me about it. I have all day.”

have never once heard anyone speak in hushed tones about the value of endarkenment. The great mystics of the Christian tradition all describe it as part of the journey into God, but it has been a long time since The Cloud of Unknowing was on anyone’s bestseller list.

Jewish German philosopher Martin Buber—“The only way to learn is through encounter”—Heinecke

I still do not know what darkness means to someone who is blind, but I am beginning to understand that “light” has as many meanings as “dark.”

“Look at the birds of the air,” Jesus said.

“Consider the lilies of the field.” If you do not have the time to pay attention to an ordinary table, how will you ever find the time to pay attention to the Spirit?

If we could learn to be attentive every moment of our lives, he said, we would discover the world anew. We would discover that the world is completely different from what we had believed it to

In seminary I was taught to interpret them as teachings about spiritual blindness,

There is also that strange thing he says at the end of a long healing story in John’s Gospel. “I came into this world for judgment,” he says after healing a man who has been blind from birth, “so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”12

who can see rightly and who cannot. I am not asking to become blind, but I have become a believer. There is a light that shines in the darkness, which is only visible there.

I always wondered why it took “three days” for significant things to happen in the Bible—Jonah

From earliest times, people learned that was how long they had to wait in the dark before the sliver of the new moon appeared in the sky.

For three days every month, they practiced resurrection.

Maybe that is how grace works, but tonight it seems equally possible that the grace I need will come to me in the dark, where I too may learn to see the celestial brightness that has nothing to do with sight.

“It was so dark that I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.” The difference between this darkness and the darkness of Dialogue in the Dark is that no one is talking me through this one. There is nothing to listen to or touch to compensate for the loss of sight.

Back in the cave, I do not know what I am doing either, but I like it. There is no way to tell time, which means there is no rush. There is no light, which means that I do not have to worry about how I look. There is no one beside me, which

means that I do not have to come up with something to say. Above all, there is no threat. Nothing

By all accounts, a stone blocked the entrance to the cave so that there were no witnesses to the resurrection. Everyone who saw the risen Jesus saw him after. Whatever happened in the cave happened 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.

he says 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

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...

As many times as I have gone out of my way to see a full sunrise, I have never done the same to see a full moonrise.

Day to day pours forth speech, and

night to night declares knowledge. —Psalm 19.2

all I knew was that I needed to know more about darkness—the

So here at the end, I think this may be a book about living with loss, which is tough enough in any place

Pema Chödrön did not become one of my teachers until I had almost finished writing,

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

the only instruction would be to become more curious about your own darkness.

drop what you believe about the dark, or have been taught about the dark, to see for yourself what is true.

a fresh baptism in the truth that loss is the way of life.

In and around all of that I will tuck as many white

flowers as I can to catch the moonlight when it comes: evening primrose, angel’s trumpet, gooseneck loosestrife, pearly everlasting—and moonflowers, of course.

to remember how much light there is in the dark?

January Adventure with Brian McLaren in 2011,