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.

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.

here is the testimony of faith: darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day.

The way most people talk about darkness, you would think that it came from a whole different deity, but no. To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and rising up. To want a life with only half of these things in it is to want half a life, shutting the other half away where it will not interfere with one’s bright fantasies of the way things ought to be.

Watching her swim slowly away after her nightmare ride through the dunes, I noted that it is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.

There are no dark emotions, Greenspan says—just unskillful ways of coping with emotions we cannot bear. The emotions themselves are conduits of pure energy that want something from us: to wake us up, to tell us something we need to know, to break the ice around our hearts, to move us to act.

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

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.

They pointed me in the right direction without telling me what to see. Though they have been here many times before, they let me explore my own cave.

“If you have understood, then what you have understood is not God,” Saint Augustine

“Easter Day is always the Sunday after the full moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox on March 21, a date which is fixed in accordance with an ancient ecclesiastical computation, and which does not always correspond to the astronomical equinox.”

If I want to flourish, I need the ever-changing light of darkness as much as I need the full light of day. Give your heart to them both, she says.

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

The Great Awakening

The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart

Pema Chödrön’s