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

by Barbara Brown Taylor

the dark. As many years as I have been listening to Easter sermons, I have never heard anyone talk about that part. Resurrection is always announced with Easter lilies, the sound of trumpets, bright streaming light. But it did not happen that way.

If it happened in a cave, it happened in complete silence, in absolute darkness, with the smell of damp s...

new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby...

in the tomb, it starts in the dark. After that, I stop thinking. I simply sit in the sweet, enveloping darkness, letting it...

We go to counselors when we want help getting out of caves. We go to directors when we are ready to be led farther in. I hope I can remember that the next time someone comes to me with a cave problem. The way out is the way in.

While I am looking for something large,

bright, and unmistakably holy, God slips something small, dark, and apparently negligible in my pocket. How many other treasures have I walked right by because they did not meet my standards? At least one of the day’s lessons is about learning to let go

of my bright ideas about God so that my eyes are open to the God who is. Wild or not, God is a...

No one chooses the dark night; the dark night descends. When it does, the reality that troubles the soul

most is the apparent absence of God. If God is light, then God is gone. There is no soft glowing space of safety in this dark night. There is no comforting sound coming out of it, reassuring the soul that all will be well.

There is an impenetrability to this darkness that isolates the soul inside it. For good or ill, no one can do your work for you while you are in this dark place. It has your name all over it, and the

only way out is through.

When the dark night first falls, it is natural to spend some time wondering if it is a test or punishment

for something you have done. This is often a sly way of staying in control of the situation, since the possibility that you have caused it comes with the hope that you can also put an end to it, either by passing the test or by enduring the punishment. The darker possibility—that this night is

beyond your control—is often too frightening to consider at first, at least partly because it means that none of your usual strategies for lightening up is going to work. One of the hardest things to decide during a dar...

comes down to what you believe about God and how God acts, which means that every dark night of the soul ...

Most people who hear the name of John’s best-known work assume that it is the memoir of a survivor describing the worst period of his life. Because so many of them have been programmed to think of “dark” as a synonym for “sinister,” they open The Dark Night of the Soul expecting John to tell them how awful it was and how he got through it by hanging on to his faith in God no matter what happened to him. Such readers are bound to be disappointed for any number of reasons. In the first place, John does not have much to say about religion. His language is passionate and speaks directly to the senses. For him, the dark night is a love story, full of the painful joy of seeking the most elusive lover of all. In the second place, he is no help at all to anyone seeking a better grip on God. One of the central functions of the dark night, he

says, is to convince those who grasp after things that God cannot be grasped. In John’s native Spanish, his word for God is nada. God is no-thing. God is not a thing. And since God is not a thing, God cannot be held on to. God can only be encountered as that which eclipses the reality of all other things.

John works in the opposite direction. He teaches by saying what God is not, hoping to convince his readers that their images of and ideas about “God” are in fact obstacles between them and the Real Thing. If this is a disappointment to some of John’s readers, it comes as a great relief to others.