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

by Barbara Brown Taylor

There is a tendency for us to flee from the wild silence and the wild dark, to pack up our gods and hunker down behind city walls, to turn the gods into idols, to kowtow before them and approach their precincts only in the official robes of office. And when we are in the temples, then who will hear the voice crying in the wilderness? Who will hear the reed shaken by the wind? —Chet Raymo, The Soul of the Night

Without benefit of maturity or therapy, I had no way of knowing that the darkness

was as much inside me as it was outside me, or that I had any power to affect its hold on me. No one had ever taught me to talk back to the dark or even to breathe into it. The idea that it might be friendly was absurd. The only strategy I had ever been taught for dealing with my fear of the dark was to turn on the lights and yell for help.

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. Just say the word and the associations begin to flow: night, nightmare, ghost, graveyard, cave, bat, vampire, death, devil, evil, criminal, danger, doubt, depression, loss, fear. Fear is the main thing. Almost everyone is afraid of being afraid. Beyond that, no one’s list is exactly like anyone else’s.

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.

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.

Most of the books on the New York Times “How-To” bestseller list are about how to avoid various kinds of darkness. If you want to learn how to be happy and stay that way, how to win out over your adversaries at work, or how to avoid aging by eating the right foods, there is a book for you. If you are not a reader, you can always find someone on the radio, the television, or the web who will tell you about the latest strategy for staying out of your dark places, or at least distract you from them for a while. Most of us own so many electronic gadgets that there is always a light box within reach when any kind of darkness begins to descend on us.

I wish I could turn to the church for help, but so many congregations are preoccupied with keeping the lights on right now that the last thing they want to talk about is how to befriend the dark.

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.

At the theological level, however, this language creates all sorts of problems. It divides every day in two, pitting the light part against the dark part. It tucks all the sinister stuff into the dark part, identifying God with the sunny part and leaving you to deal with the rest on your own time. It implies things about dark-skinned people and sight-impaired people that are not true. Worst of all, it offers people of faith a giant closet in which they can store everything that threatens or frightens them without thinking too much about those things. It rewards them for their unconsciousness, offering spiritual justification for turning away from those things, for “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).

To embrace that teaching and others like it at face value can result in a kind of spirituality that deals with darkness by denying its existence or at least depriving it of any meaningful attention. I call it “full solar spirituality,” since it focuses on staying in the light of God around the clock, both absorbing and reflecting the sunny side of faith. You can usually recognize a full solar church by its emphasis on the benefits of faith, which include a sure sense of God’s presence, certainty of belief, divine guidance in all things, and reliable answers to prayer. Members strive to be positive in attitude, firm in conviction, helpful in relationship, and unwavering in faith. This sounds like heaven on earth. Who would not like to dwell in God’s light 24/7?

what would my life with God look like if I trusted this rhythm instead of opposing it? What was I afraid of, exactly, and how much was I missing by reaching reflexively for the lights? Did I have enough faith to explore the dark instead of using faith to bar all my doors? How much more was in store for me if I could learn to walk in the dark?

I was ordained in my early thirties and served a couple of churches until I was close to fifty. Then I decided to leave parish ministry for a whole host of reasons, including my loss of faith in the institution I was serving. By writing a book about that experience, I discovered my part in my lover’s quarrel with the church. Let’s just say that an introverted romantic with a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder does not make the best pastor. But I also discovered a number of things about my Christian tradition that had not been apparent to me while I was busy upholding it. Chief among these is the way Christian teaching thrives on dividing reality into opposed pairs: good/evil, church/world, spirit/flesh, sacred/profane, light/dark.

In every case, the language of opposition works by placing half of reality closer to God and the other half farther away. This not only simplifies life for people who do not want to spend a lot of time thinking about whether the divisions really hold; it also offers them a strong sense of purpose by giving them daily battles to engage in. The more they win out over the world of the flesh, the better. The more they beat back the powers of darkness, the closer they get to God. The ultimate goal is to live with that God forever, in a bright heaven where the bottom half of every earthly equation has finally returned to dust.

When Christian teaching offered me an answer—that I was caught up in the fundamental struggle between spirit and flesh—it also offered me a strategy for victory. If I would commit myself to following Jesus, then every day, in every way, he would help me turn from the dark to live with him in the light. Of course, my language evolved through the years as I became more mature in faith, but the essential worldview did not change. Even after I found a church that affirms the goodness of creation as much as any I know, Sunday worship still turned on the axis of blood sacrifice, which made the death of the body the way of eternal life. After I became ordained, I led the congregation in achingly beautiful prayers thanking God for the gifts of the earth, the church, and the Spirit—but also in prayers asking God to deliver us from the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Since this language matched much of the language in scripture, it blended in. Plus, it seemed to work for a lot of people, the

same way it had worked for me. It was not until later, after I had resigned from saying these words on a regular basis, that they began to sound lame. Their explanation for what was wrong with me was no longer a relief but an ongoing source of injury. Their description of divine reality no longer struck with the force of revelation but resounded with the clang of a truth claim that bore closer inspection. Saying them over and over again in a sacred place, it had been possible to overlook the way they divided people in two, teaching us over and over again that we had two minds, two natures, two sets of loyalties, two homes—and that only one was close to God. Too much of this can make a person crazy.

the days of their lives are not easily divisible into good and evil, spirit and flesh; that some of the best things that have ever happened to them have happened in the darkest places, and some of the worst in well-lit churches; that their bodies have been the source not only of great pain but also of great pleasure; that they experience the world as a place of wonder as well as brokenness; and that they have a hard time warming up to any kind of salvation that divides reality in two and asks them to forsake the bottom half.

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. What can light possibly mean without dark? Who

knows spirit without also knowing flesh? Is anyone altogether good or altogether evil? Where is the church that exists outside the world? People of faith who are committed to fullness of life have our work cut out for us, if only in changing the way we talk.

If I have any expertise, it is in the realm of spiritual darkness: fear of the unknown, familiarity with divine absence, mistrust of conventional wisdom, suspicion of religious comforters, keen awareness of the limits of all language about God and at the same time shame over my inability to speak of God without a thousand qualifiers, doubt about the health of my soul, and barely suppressed contempt for those who have

no such qualms. These are the areas of my proficiency.

If you are in the middle of your life, maybe some of your dreams of God have died hard under the weight of your experience. You have knocked on doors that have not opened. You have asked for bread and been given a stone. The job that once defined you has lost its meaning; the relationships that once sustained you have changed or come to their natural ends. It is time to reinvent everything from your work life to your love life to your life with God—only how are you supposed to do that exactly, and where will the wisdom come from?

Learning to walk in the dark is an especially valuable skill in times like these—or maybe I should say remembering how to walk in the dark,

since people of faith have deep pockets of wisdom about how to live through long nights in the wilderness. We just forgot, most of us, once we got where we were going and the glory days began.

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.

Meanwhile, 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.

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

Whoever you are: some evening take a step out of your house, which you know so well. Enormous space is near. —Rainer Maria Rilke

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.

“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.”

With all those caveats, the question remains: how do we develop the courage to walk in the dark if we are never asked to practice?

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.

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.

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 Version. When the true light comes into the world, the world does not know him. Though he comes to those in darkness and the shadow of death, they love darkness more than light. On the day he dies, darkness descends on the land from noon until three. He has come as light into the

world, so that everyone who believes in him shall not remain in the darkness, but some people just cannot be helped. “They are wild waves of the sea casting up the foam of their own shame,” reads Jude 13; “wandering stars, for whom the deepest darkness has been reserved forever.” Yet even in the Bible, that is not the whole story about darkness. Anyone who knows the story of Abraham remembers the night God led him outside to look at the stars. The old man was deep in doubt about whether God’s promise of children would ever come true. He and his wife Sarah had been waiting so long that hope was little more than a habit. All they knew was that God kept saying “soon,” but soon never came. So when God said it the next time—“Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great”—Abraham decided to point out the obvious. “You have given me no offspring,” Abraham said bluntly, “and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.” God did not argue with him. Instead, God told the old man to go outside and look up at the sky. “Count the stars, if you are able,” God said to Abraham, for “so shall your

descendants be.” It was not something that could have happened in the middle of the day. The night sky was a key player i...

God. Once you start noticing how many important things happen at night in the Bible, the list grows fast.

The darkness that dominates this story has nothing to do with what time of day it is. It has nothing to do with the position of the planets in the sky or the rods and cones in people’s eyes. It is an entirely unnatural darkness—both dangerous and divine—that contains the presence of the God before whom there are no others. It is so different from what other Hebrew words mean when they say “dark” that it has its own word in the Bible: araphel, reserved for God’s exclusive use. This thick darkness reveals the divine presence even while obscuring

it, the same way the brightness of God’s glory does. Both are signs of God’s mercy, since ordinary human beings are not equipped to survive direct contact with the divine, in the dark or in the light. This view of darkness is far more nuanced than the one that demonizes darkness. While this darkness is dangerous, it is as sure a sign of God’s presence as brightness is, which makes the fear of it different from the fear of snakes and robbers. 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.

A thousand years earlier, a Cappadocian monk named Gregory of Nyssa was the first to see Moses’s cloud as a cipher for the spiritual life. “Moses’s vision began with light,” he wrote. “Afterwards God spoke to him in a cloud. But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect, he saw God in the darkness.”2 In the same way, Gregory said, 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.

Now, when I listen to people talk about light and darkness, it is easy to become despondent about the odds of redeeming the dark. “That was a really dark movie,” a friend says, describing a film in which the villain killed people as casually as he picked his teeth. “I am in a dark place right now,” another says while she waits for the results of a pathology report. “Jesus is the light of the world,” someone else says to her by way of consolation. “Just remember that. Even when it’s so dark you can’t see God, God can still see you.” I cannot remember the last time I heard anyone use “dark” to describe something good. Fear of the dark has been sanctified in so many people’s minds that I have to

define my terms—not once, but over and over again—because without constant reminders that darkness is not a synonym for mortal or spiritual danger, most people I know revert to the equation without even thinking about it. It is as if they have a default setting for darkness in their minds that automatically resets every time the sun comes up. In the full light of day, darkness becomes the most convenient place for them to store all their shadows: their fear of the unknown, their anxiety about the future, their loathing of their own helplessness, their bottomless dread of death.

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.

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.

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?

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?

What would Moses say to people who feel free to ask God for good weekend weather and safe travel to away games? The God of Moses is not the grandfatherly type, a kind old deity who can be counted on to take the kids exciting places without letting them get hurt. The God of Moses is holy, offering no seat belts or other safety features to those who wish to climb the mountain and enter the dark cloud of divine presence. Those who go assume all risk and give up all claim to reward. Those who return say the dazzling dark inside the cloud is reward enough.

How much will we pay to fuel the engines that keep our world lit, rather than doing what is necessary to feel safer inside ourselves?

our comfort or discomfort with the outer dark is a good barometer of how we feel about the inner kind.

As anyone who ever took a biology class knows, human beings are diurnal creatures with eyes adapted to light. When we go out at night, we need light to see. Many of the creatures we glimpse in the beams of our headlights or flashlights are nocturnal creatures, with eyes adapted to darkness. They need very little light to see. For these reasons and more, it is we and not they who have bent the physical world to meet our particular needs. We are the human engineers who have filled the night with light so that our eyes work no matter what time it is. Where I live, the worst thing a new neighbor can do is move in and install a new security light that douses the stars for the rest of us.