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

by Barbara Brown Taylor

“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.

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. Even if you are not Christian, it should be easy to tell which half of each pair is “higher” and which “lower.” 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.

All in all, my experience of physical darkness does not extend much beyond reading a good book by bad light. 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.

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.

According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, every day ends with three different twilights. Civil twilight begins a little before dark, when you first notice that it is time to use the headlights on your car.

Nautical twilight comes next, when the brightest stars are visible enough to steer by. That means Venus will be a front-runner, showing up low over the western horizon while the cicadas kick up their chorus of thrumming in the woods.

One of the books on my reading list was a collection of essays called Let There Be Night, including one by a Brit named James Bremner who said he was mightily afraid of the dark as a child. There was no reason for him to be afraid, he says now. He lived in a small village in western Scotland where there were no wild animals or known criminals. But there were also no streetlights or porch lights in his village, which meant that once night fell, the darkness was absolute. Every evening after supper, it was his job to take the family’s empty milk bottles down to the bottom of the driveway so the milkman could swap them out next morning—a chore that put a major dent in his personal history of darkness. The driveway was only about a hundred yards long, but from the house it disappeared into complete blackness almost at once. When James finally balled up the courage to walk into it—running was not an option with glass bottles in his arms—he lived for the moment when he could set them down and race back to the house. The darkness never stopped terrifying him. Every single night it took all the courage he had.

But while his fear of the dark may have been baseless, the bravery it drew out of him stayed with him for the rest of his life. “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.” Darkness, he says, fits that bill.2 As much as I love the story, it is hard to imagine it happening today. Most parents I know would give their darkness-challenged child another chore or offer to go with him.

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?

I started going to church with them. Twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday night, the preacher of that church taught me things about darkness that I had never known. Without a single grinding of gears, he shifted the subject from physical darkness to spiritual darkness, using my history of the one to fuel my fear of the other. He taught me it was no mistake that “devil” and “darkness” began with the same letter, since they came from and were headed to the same place, along with Satan and all his minions. He read scripture to support his points, picking out so many verses about outer darkness, the power of darkness, and the people of darkness that bumps broke out on my arms and the back of my neck got sweaty.

Before too many weeks had passed, I asked to be baptized the way someone on fire asks to be hosed down. I wanted to be saved from the devouring power of darkness.

Spiritual darkness was like a mist that could seep under any door, rise through the cracks in any floorboards. I could not swing a stick at it or get away from it by running. My only defense was to keep the light of Christ burning brightly inside me, which meant reading the Bible, going to church, and praying every day so that the lamp of my faith did not go out.

After Jack enlisted in the army and I went off to college, Carol and I lost touch. Sunday services at my university chapel were so different from the church where I had been baptized that it was hard to believe they were the same religion. I was so relieved to find a community of faith that did not run on the fuel of fear that I became a religion major, eager to learn whatever there was to learn by the light of this kinder Christianity. But if I had hoped for a better Bible to go with it, I did not get one. 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.

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.

Once you start noticing how many important things happen at night in the Bible, the list grows fast. Jacob wrestles an angel by a river all night long, surviving the match with a limp, a blessing, and a new name. His son Joseph dreams such dreams at night that he catches a pharaoh’s attention, graduating from the dungeon to the palace to become the royal interpreter of dreams. The exodus from Egypt happens at night; God parts the Red Sea at night; manna falls from the sky in the wilderness at night—and that is just the beginning.

One of the heaviest clusters of darkness in the early books of the Bible has nothing to do with nighttime, however.

“I am going to come to you in a dense cloud,” God says to Moses, “in order that the people may hear when I speak with you and so trust you ever after.”

the morning of the big day the weather seems not to be cooperating. The sky is alive with thunder and lightning. The whole top of the mountain is covered by a dark cloud, while the rest of it is shaking like a nuclear reactor about to blow.

Then God calls Moses to the top of the mountain, where God has one final instruction for him: no one down below should make any attempt to enter the dark cloud. If they do, they will die. Moses is the only one who will be allowed to survive a direct encounter with the divine.

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.

When I took my first course in Christian mysticism at the age of nineteen, I learned to call this the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—the terrible and fascinating mystery of God—which exceeds human ability to manage it in any way. “This darkness and cloud is always between you and God, no matter what you do,” wrote the anonymous fourteenth-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing, “and it prevents you from seeing him clearly by the light of understanding in your reason and from experiencing him in sweetness of love in your affection. So set yourself to rest in this darkness as long as you can, always crying out after ...

What? God exists in darkness? Cloudy vision is a good thing? This was so different from anything I had learned in church that I had to know more—but who could teach me about this tremendous mystery? In another century I might have gone to live in a cave or a convent, but my college advisor suggested seminary instead, so that became the plan. In the fall I would become a first-year student at a reputable divinity school, but meanwhile I had three months to kill. Since waiting tables was my only marketable skill, and the best money to be made was in the high-end tourist trade, I became a cocktail waitress at Dante’s Down the Hatch, a jazz club in Underground Atlanta, while I waited to go to seminary. In most ways, this turned out to be the best preparation for a theological education that a girl could have.

I learned how to carry Singapore slings on a tray above my head while dodging customers on their way to and from the bathrooms, as well as how to replenish the fuel under a hot fondue pot without setting the table on fire. On a good night I made sixty dollars cash; on a great night, a hundred. The money was so compelling that I asked Dante to let me return the following summer. He was so charmed by the idea of a seminary-trained cocktail waitress that he said yes.

For the next three years, this arrangement put an interesting edge on my theological education. During the days of the school year, I took classes in ontology, ecclesiology, and eschatology, in which I was invited to order my thoughts about the nature of being human, the purpose of human community, and the future of humankind. I learned the principles of effective preaching, sound leadership, and pastoral care. On summer nights at Dante’s, I dealt with businessmen who used me to prove how much power they had over people who made less money than they did, and tourists who drank so much that when I brought them their checks at the end of the night they looked at me like I was pressing a gun to their ribs. I learned that people will confess things to a stranger in a nightclub that they have never admitted to anyone they know by the clear light of day. Because I was the least significant person they knew, such people would tell me things they should have been telling a doctor, a lawyer, a psychiatrist, or a judge. I would not hear such stories again for years, until as a young priest I became a different kind of stranger to people who had no one else to tell their stories to.

All these years later, I like to think that I learned as much about human nature waiting tables at Dante’s as I did writing papers for my seminary professors. One happened in the dark and one happened in the light, but together they offered me a better education in the mysterium tremendum than I could ever have gotten by attending just one of them. Later, when I stood in front of an altar waving incense, I would remember standing in front of the bar at Dante’s waving cigarette smoke out of my face, and the exact same feeling of tenderness would wash over me, because the people in both places were so much alike. We were all seeking company, meaning, solace, self-forgetfulness. Whether we ever found those things or not, it was the seeking that led us to find each other in the cloud even when we had nothing else in common. Sometimes I wondered if it even mattered whether our communion cups were filled with consecrated wine or

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.

Though my intrigue with physical darkness preceded the dread of metaphysical darkness I picked up in church, I am not insensible to the dangers of darkness. I have worked emergency rooms and county jails, slept in tents with wild things snuffling outside, and visited inmates on death row. Though I have never been the victim of a violent crime after dark, I know people who have. One bought a trained German shepherd that went everywhere with her after that. Another bought a gun. I am not sure what I would do. Although some of my experiences with darkness have been life threatening, none has involved another person who wished to do me harm.

Remembering that night now, I can dissect it better than I could then. The snake scared me, but it did not hurt me. Based on its behavior, it was as frightened of me as I was of it.

That snake’s opening of its mouth for those eggs was as natural as my jerking my hand away from its cool body in the dark. Everything else was my invention, made all the more vivid because I could not see.

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?

The mountain shook like it was about to blow apart. The cloud at the top of the mountain was so thick that even Moses could not see inside it. Anyone else who even tried would die, God said—and Moses went anyway. He took the full dose of divine darkness and lived to tell about

“You broke faith with me,” God said at the end. “Although you may view the land from a distance, you shall not enter it.” It is hard to get from a story like that to a bumper sticker that says, “God is love.”

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.

For a measure of your comfort with the dark, notice how many lights you leave on at night. Is one per room enough or do you prefer more? Is a bright home sufficient or does the yard need to be lit too? In these ways and more, our comfort or discomfort with the outer dark is a good barometer of how we feel about the inner kind.

Is this true?

After reading this, I close the book and turn off the light by my bed. It is only dark for a moment before I see the small eyes looking back at me from all over the room—phone charger, printer power button, radio dial, digital clock—plus the light on the side of my computer that tells me it is sleeping, casting a wide shadow on my wall that rises and falls with every virtual breath. How did I ever mistake this for dark? One by one I unplug them all, though it means waking the computer up to turn it off and resetting the clock in the morning. Then I walk through the house like Nyx, drawing the curtain of darkness behind me as I go. When all the lights are off, there is still plenty of light left, both inside and outside of me. On the spot, I decide to rename my children: Rest, Hush, Tribe of Stars, Slow, Truce, and—depending on whom you ask—Dazzle. If I want to get to know them, there is no better time than now. All I have to do is sit right where I am, letting them come to me for once instead of sending them away.

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? By day I can outfox questions like these—racing from one appointment to the next, answering e-mails with red exclamation points by them, taking the suddenly sick dog to the vet, rummaging through the freezer for something to thaw for supper. By day, I am a servant of the urgent. Nothing important has a chance with me. I am too consumed with the things that must be done to consider whether or not doing them even matters. But in the middle of the night I do not have so much to do. Once the lights are off and I am lying in my bed, the dark angel knows right where to find me. I am a captive audience.

The wondering led her to explore the idea that emotions such as grief, fear, and despair have gained a reputation as “the dark emotions” not because they are noxious or abnormal but because Western culture keeps them shuttered in the dark with other shameful things like personal bankruptcy or sexual deviance.

There’s no time for that, I told them. We can’t stop. We have to keep working. Not long after that, all the words lay down and died, lying on the page like ants in a poisoned anthill: little black bodies everywhere, their legs curled up like burnt whiskers. I poked at them, but they did not move.

Later, after I had met my deadline by turning in an ashcan of words smoking with despair, it was clear that something had to change. Over the next few months, I overrode all my introversion to make a life with room for more people, doing things that had seemed frivolous to me before.

I had segregated my feelings without even thinking about it, putting all of the “dark” ones on one side and all of the “light” ones on the other.

Clearly, all the drawings were true, which made them all valuable in some way or another. Sadness went to parts of my body that Joy did not touch. Rage had the most horsepower by far, but only until it ran into Hurt. Then those two fell into each other’s arms and cried until Relief covered them both. Even though I had drawn the emotions on different pages, there was no keeping them apart. The only real difference between Anxiety and Excitement was my willingness to let go of Fear. Sometimes, when I was anxious, all I had to do was take a deep breath, and my nervousness turned to anticipation.

Greenspan says that painful emotions are like the Zen teacher who whacks his students with a flat board right between their shoulder blades when he sees them going to sleep during meditation. If we can learn to tolerate the whack—better yet, to let it wake us up—we may discover the power hidden in the heart of the pain.

What such people stand to discover, Greenspan says, is the close relationship between “individual heartbreak and the brokenheartedness of the world.”

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.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,” Carl Jung wrote, “but by making the darkness conscious.”3 Reading this, 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. The great mystics of the Christian tradition all describe it as part of the journey into God, but it has been a long time since The Cloud of Unknowing was on anyone’s bestseller list. 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.

Ken Wilber is not a Christ...

a book called One Taste, he makes a distinction between two important functions of religion. The first function, which he calls translation, offers people a new way of translating the world around them so that their lives take on more meaning. One function of Christian faith, for instance, is to offer believers a new way to translate their hardships. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” In these beatitudes, spiritual poverty and grief are moved from the “loss” side of the ledger to the “gain” side, enabling those who suffer to view their hardships as blessings.

But 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.”

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