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

by Barbara Brown Taylor

After dark, when my eyes have semiretired for the night, all these other 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. This is the basic idea behind the Blindekuh restaurant in Zurich, opened by four blind entrepreneurs in the late 1990s, where diners still make reservations months ahead to eat in the dark. A

When I heard about an exhibit in Atlanta called “Dialogue in the Dark,” the needle on my darkness meter bent toward the red zone. What dialogue, with whom, in what kind of dark? It turned out to be the Atlanta version of an installation that had toured 150 cities in more than thirty countries since its inception in the late 1980s—the brainchild of a German social entrepreneur named Andreas Heinecke.

Dialogue in the Dark was the result—a kind of reality show in which sighted people are given red-tipped white canes before entering a completely dark exhibition hall where they are introduced to their blind guides.6

When my turn came, I dropped into the boat, ready for my dialogue with the dark to be over. But I was also aware of how blindness had split the distance between me and all these other people. Touching was inevitable; apologies were redundant. We were not embarrassed to be dependent on each other. Since none of us could be sure who was black or white, young or old, our exchanges were free of any ideas we had about those identity markers. Maybe someone should start an Opaque Church, where we could learn to give up one kind of vision in hope of another. Instead of wearing name tags, we would touch each other’s faces. Instead of looking around to see who’s there, we could learn to listen for each other’s voices.

I still do not know what darkness means to someone who is blind, but I am beginning to understand that “light” has as many meanings as “dark.” There is an old prayer in The Book of Common Prayer that goes like this: Look down, O Lord, from your heavenly throne, and illumine this night with your celestial brightness; that by night as by day your people may glorify your holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.7 Among other things, this prayer recognizes a kind of light that transcends both wave and particle. It can illumine the night without turning on the lights, becoming apparent to those who have learned to rely on senses other than sight to show them what is real. This is the light the mystics see when they meditate in the night hours, picking up their pens in the morning to write down their revelations. It is the light Moses saw in the darkness on Mount Sinai, where the glory of God came wrapped in dazzling darkness. Dionysius the Areopagite called it “the unapproachable light in which God dwells.”

“Since becoming blind, I have paid more attention to a thousand things,” Lusseyran wrote.11 One of his greatest discoveries was how the light he saw changed with his inner condition. When he was sad or afraid, the light decreased at once. Sometimes it went out altogether, leaving him deeply and truly blind. When he was joyful and attentive, it returned as strong as ever. He learned very quickly that the best way to see the inner light and remain in its presence was to love.

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 light that shines in the darkness, which is only visible there.

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.

Since my lamp is off, I think about how many hours I have spent in therapy instead, doing more or less the same thing: walking around the boulders of my childhood to see how they look from every angle, peering down into the holes where I spent months in the dark, wondering why the handholds I can see from the top were invisible from the bottom. The difference between the therapy and the cave is that the therapy wants me to look back so I can find another way out, not so I can return by the same way I came. Maybe that makes the cave more like a labyrinth. As long as you stay on the path, you cannot get lost—in time, maybe, but not in space. The path is circular. The way out is the way in. The path, like the cave, never changes. It is literally set in stone. Only the walker changes, not by looking back but by moving ahead, trusting the path to teach her what she needs to know.

While I am deciding whether a cave is more like a labyrinth or a maze, I remember something else Hurd’s teacher said: “No romantics in the cave, and no showoffs either. In a cave they’re a pain in the ass.”

This time I think about all the great spiritual leaders whose lives changed in caves.

Gautama Buddha meditated regularly in them, setting such an example for his followers that if you go to India, China, or Tibet, your tour guide can almost always take you to a meditation cave.

the first verses of the Qur’an spooled into the world from the belly of a cave.

The traditional place of Jesus’s birth is not in the Church of the Nativity but under it, in a small cave under the altar.

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 stone and dug earth in the air. Sitting deep in the heart of Organ Cave, I let this sink in: new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.

When it is time to go, I follow Rockwell and Marrion back out of the cave again, thinking about what good guides they are.

Though they have been here many times before, they let me explore my own cave. Maybe that is the difference between pastoral counselors and spiritual directors. 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.

Back in my room that night, I unpack my backpack, surprised to find the stone at the bottom. Remembering how it glittered in the darkest part of the cave, I hold it under the reading lamp anticipating miniature fireworks. Instead, it looks like a piece of road gravel—pigeon colored, with a faint sparkle along one side. If

But the stone is not the problem. The light is the problem. Even the reading light is too much. Rummaging in my pack for a penlight, I click it on and aim the beam at my hand. The stone turns into a diamond factory before my eyes, fully as dazzling as I remember.

The stone is alive with light, but only in the dark. When I turn on the lamp again, it goes back to being a small piece of gravel in my hand. Or my eyes go back to seeing it that way. When I entered the cave hoping for a glimpse of celestial brightness, it never occurred to me that it might be so small. But here it is, not much bigger than a mustard seed—everything I need to remember how much my set ideas get in my way.

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 cave I do not want to miss.

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. In theological terms, this makes John a teacher in the negative way, which does not mean that he is a pain to be around. It means that he does not try to teach by saying what God is, since positive statements about God serve chiefly to fool people into believing that their half-baked images of God and their flawed ideas about how God acts are the Real Thing. 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. I cannot say for sure when my reliable ideas about God began to slip away, but the big chest ...

The slippage started with the language of faith, which I had spoken fluently for a long time. After years of teaching other people what words like “sin,” “salvation,” “repentance,” and “grace” really meant, those same words began to mean less and less to me. When I had first learned them, they had helped me to make sense of the tumult both inside and outside, giving me special names for what was happening as well as a sturdy framework for managing it. Then, so gradually that it is hard to say when things changed, those same words began to sound more like stuffed pillows—things to be placed between a person and the hard bones of life so that less bruising occurred.

I do not believe I am describing a loss of faith in God here. Instead, I believe I am describing a loss of faith in the system that promised to help me grasp God not only by setting my feet on the right track but also by giving me the right language, concepts, and tools to get a hook in the Real Thing when I found it. To lose all that is not the same thing as spending eleven months in a dungeon. It may not even qualify as a true dark night of the soul, but it is without doubt the cloudiest evening of the soul I have known so far. After so many years of trying to cobble together a way of thinking about God that makes sense so that I can safely settle down with it, it all turns to nada. There is no permanently safe place to settle. I will always be at sea, steering by stars. Yet as dark as this sounds, it provides great relief, because it now sounds truer than anything that came before.

In his book The Future of Faith, Harvey Cox says that the Age of Belief ended in 2005, when the new European Union declined to mention “Christian” anywhere in its constitution.4 People have voted with their feet. Doctrines and creeds are no longer enough to keep faith alive. Instead, the faithful seek practical guidance and direct experience of the sacred. The new age we are living in is the Age of the Spirit, Cox says, already well under way in the global South.

By the nineteenth century, when knowledge about almost anything consisted chiefly of empirical facts, belief became the opposite of knowledge. A person’s belief in God was reduced to his or her belief system—the unprovable statements of faith that person judged to be true. The great pity of this conflation, Fowler says, is that when faith is reduced to belief in creeds and doctrines, plenty of thoughtful people are going to decide that they no longer have faith. They might hang on if they heard the word used to describe trust or loyalty in something beyond the self, but when they hear “faith” used to signify belief in a set formula of theological truths, the light in their eyes goes out.