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

by Barbara Brown Taylor

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.