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.

I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.

All in all, the moon is a truer mirror for my soul than the sun that looks the same way every day.

If there is any truth to the teaching that spiritual reality is divided into halves, it is the truth that those pairs exist in balance, not opposition.

even when light fades and darkness falls—as it does every single day, in every single life—God does not turn the world over to some other deity.

darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day.

As universal as darkness may be, our experience of it is local. It is also social, cultural, economic, and political, since our relationship with darkness is never limited to what we have personally sensed or intuited about it.

When you love a child, you do not deal in reasonable probabilities. You deal in dreadful possibilities,

“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.

how do we develop the courage to walk in the dark if we are never asked to practice?

“Count the stars, if you are able,” God said to Abraham, for “so shall your descendants be.” It was not something that could have happened in the middle of the day. The night sky was a key player in Abraham’s decision to trust God.

When Jacob could not run any longer, he lay down in the middle of nowhere and fell asleep, dreaming one of those dreams that arrives more like a vision. He saw a ladder with its feet set on the earth and its top reaching toward heaven, with the bright angels of God climbing up and down on it. That was when God said more or less the same thing to Jacob that he had said to his grandfather Abraham. “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” It was not something that could have happened in the middle of the day. The night vision was a key player in Jacob’s decision to believe God.

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,

learning to walk in the dark might involve some actual skills and not simply bravado.

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 Milky Way, about which Ovid wrote more than two thousand years ago, is now invisible to two-thirds of those living in the United States.

The brightest spots on earth have never been the places where the most people live, but rather the places where the most prosperous people live. Where there is money and power enough to light the night, darkness does not stand a chance. That is why it is so important for those of us with the resources to handle our nyctophobia, our fear of the night.

The name of our dread comes from Nyx, the daughter of Chaos, one of the earliest and scariest gods of the Greeks. Her job was to ride across the sky at day’s end in a chariot drawn by two pitch-black horses, drawing the curtain of night behind her as she went.

Thus in Greek myth as well as in the book of Genesis, darkness precedes light.

“All light is late,” wrote the poet Li-Young Lee, reminding me how long it takes for starlight to reach my eyes.

A bed, in short, is where you face your nearness to or farness from God. Whether you are in pain or not, whether you are an anxious person or not—even, I think, whether you are a religious person or not—a bed is where you come face-to-face with what really matters because it is too dark for most of your usual, shallowing distractions to work.

Tonight there will be no moon in the sky. For close to three days it will rise and set with the sun, leaving the stars alone to light the night. 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.

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 the dark.

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.

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.

The only thing the dark night requires of us is to remain conscious. If we can stay with the moment in which God seems most absent, the night will do the rest.

We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light. —Hildegard of Bingen

In the book of Genesis, darkness was first; light came second. Darkness was upon the face of the deep before God said anything. Then God said “light” and there was light, but the second word God said was not “darkness,” because the darkness was already there. How did it get there? What was it made of? I do not know. All I know is that darkness was not created; it was already there, so God’s act on the first day of creation was not to make light and darkness but to make light and separate it from the darkness, calling the light “day” and the darkness “night.”

do I want the kind of light that shines on things or the kind that shines from them?

With limited time left on this earth, I want more than the top halves of things—the spirit but not the flesh, the presence but not the absence, the faith but not the doubt. This late in life, I want it all.