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

by Barbara Brown Taylor

treasures of darkness

When my husband Ed and I lived in the city, we almost never looked at the sky.

took a cut in pay when I moved to the country, but the sky alone is worth it.

he points his muzzle straight at the moon and lets out a high howl unlike any other sound he makes. In seconds all the other dogs who hear him join in, letting the coyotes know that the neighborhood watch system is working.

I need to start taking some walks in my own dark.

child who grew up in an urban housing project will fear things worse than coyotes when she bolts her doors at night.

I am the wicked witch who means to delay the good prince in his rush to wake them up.

Buy a lamp for her room that will project stars on her ceiling.

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

I was suffering from the full solar version of Christianity, dedicated to keeping young people like me out of as many dark places as possible, including but not limited to smoky nightclubs, back alleys, dark bedrooms, shady dope dens, and dim jail cells. In many ways it was just what I needed at that point in my life. It scared me straight. It turned my face to the sun. It offered me a map with a clearly marked path on it and answered all my questions about why I should not stray from it. But it also saddled me with a kind of darkness disability that would haunt me for years to come.

The night vision was a key player in Jacob’s decision to believe God.

mysterium tremendum et fascinans—the terrible and fascinating mystery of God—which

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.”1

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.

“All light is late,” wrote the poet Li-Young Lee, reminding me how long it takes for starlight to reach my eyes. When I look at the stars, I may be seeing late light from some whose funerals took place a long, long time ago. Stars are light-years away; galaxies are millions of times that far away. Chet Raymo, who is to astronomy what Li-Young Lee is to poetry, tells me that if I could find Quasar 3C 273 in my backyard telescope, I would be looking at a point of light that started heading my way more than one and a half billion years ago.5 Compared to that, the sun is a newborn. Hundreds of thousands of stars flared up and burned out again before the Milky Way galaxy delivered her first sun.

every atom on earth comes from the sky I am looking at:

If I cannot imagine eternal life any other way, I can start with a carbon atom, since every one that ever existed is still around here somewhere.

Every one of these atoms came to earth from the heavens.