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

by Barbara Brown Taylor

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.

What if I could learn to trust my feelings instead of asking to be delivered from them? What if I could follow one of my great fears all the way to the edge of the abyss, take a breath, and keep going? Isn’t there a chance of being surprised by what happens next? Better than that, what if I could learn how to stay in the present instead of letting my anxieties run on fast-forward?

If you have ever spent time in the company of the dark emotions, you too may have received subtle messages from friends and strangers alike that you were supposed to handle them and move on sooner instead of later. Some of us have

even gotten the message that if we cannot do this on schedule, we may not have enough faith in God. If we had enough, we would be able banish the dark angels from our beds, replacing them with the light angels of belief, trust, and praise. Greenspan calls this “spiritual

bypassing”—using religion to dodge the dark emotions instead of letting it lead us to embrace those dark angels as the best, most demanding spiritual teachers we may ever know.

Religion can lead us away from the transformation and freedom found in the dark night of our own soul.

One of the main things that tip people toward garden-variety depression, she says, is a “low

tolerance for sadness.” It is the inability to bear dark emotions that causes many of our most significant problems, in other words, and not the emotions themselves. When we cannot tolerate the dark, we try all kinds of art...

shopping, shallow sex, and hours in front of the television set or computer. There are no dark emotions, Greenspan says—just unskillful ways of coping with emotions we cannot bear. The emoti...

something from us: to wake us up, to tell us something we need to know, to break the ice around o...

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

The only real difference between Anxiety and Excitement was my willingness to let go of Fear.

Nights like that taught me the importance of letting emotions flow—even the loud and messy ones—because if they are kept from making their noise

and maybe even tossing the furniture, they can harden like plaque in a coronary artery, blocking anything else that tries to come through. Eruptions are good news, the signal that darkness will not stay buried. If you can stand the upsetting energy, you may be

allowed to watch while dark and light come ba...

Who would stick around to wrestle a dark angel all night long if there

were any chance of escape? The only answer I can think of is this: someone in deep need of blessing; someone willing to limp forever for the blessing that follows the wound.

While those who are frightened by the primal energy of dark emotions try to avoid them, becoming more and more cut off from the world at large, those who are willing to wrestle with angels

break out of their isolation by dirtying their hands with the emotions that rattle them most. In this view, 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 ...

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.

I realize that in a whole lifetime spent with seekers of enlightenment, I have never once heard anyone speak in hushed tones about the value of endarkenment.

Today’s seekers seem more interested in getting God to turn the lights on than in allowing God to

turn them off. Full solar spirituality strikes again.

translation is not the only function of religion. The second function, which Wilber calls transformation, exists not to comfort the self but to dismantle it. “Those who find their life will lose it,” Jesus says later in Matthew’s Gospel, “and those who lose their life

for my sake will find it.” The Greek word for “life” in this passage is psyche: the human breath, life, or soul. While Greek has no word for “ego” (a word that did not exist in any language before the early nineteenth century), psyche comes close. The salvation of the

psyche begins with its own demise. 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...

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 lo...

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.”

Even the crowds around Jesus vanished once it became clear where he was headed.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings. —Wendell Berry

Sight and sound both come at me with such velocity every day

that I have learned to defend myself against them. If I do not limit their access to me, I will grow such thick calluses that I am no longer capable of seeing or hearing things that really matter.

senses wake up. With the day’s barrage of sights and sounds toned down, it is possible to savor things that slip right past me in the light. Food tastes better by candlelight. Conversations last longer. The smell of the vineyard is in the wine.

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.

Every major spiritual tradition in the world has something significant to say about the importance of paying attention. “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?

He learned very quickly that the best way to see the inner light and remain in its presence was to

love.

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. 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 be. Because blindness taught him that, he listened with disbelief as the most earnest people he knew spoke about the

terrible “night” into which his blindness had pushed him. “The seeing do not believe in the blind,” he concluded, which may help explain why there are so many stories in the Bible about blind people begging to be healed. Whoever wrote down those stories

could...

“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 Before reading Lusseyran, I always heard that as a

threatening judgment. Now it sounds more promising to me. At the very least, it makes me wonder how seeing has made me blind—by giving me cheap confidence that one quick glance at things can tell me what they are, by distracting me from learning how the light inside me

works, by fooling me into thinking I have a clear view of how things really are, of where the road leads, of who can see rightly and who cannot. I am not asking to become blind, but I have become a believer. There is a lig...

I always wondered why it took “three days” for significant things to happen in the Bible—Jonah spent three days in the belly of the whale, Jesus

spent three days in the tomb, Paul spent three days blind in Damascus—and now I know. 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. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.” Maybe. Maybe that is how grace works, but tonight it seems equally po...

where I too may learn to see the celestial brightness that has noth...

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