Learning to Walk in the Dark Quotes

“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?”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“here is the testimony of faith: darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“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.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“This is not a how-to book, but if it were, the only instruction would be to become more curious about your own darkness. What can you learn about your fear of it by staying with it for a moment before turning on the lights? Where can you feel the fear in your body? When have you felt that way before? What are you afraid is going to happen to you, and what is your mind telling you to do about it? What stories do you tell yourself to keep your fear in place? What helps you stay conscious even when you are afraid? What have you learned in the dark that you could never have learned in the light?”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. —Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“A thousand years earlier, a Cappadocian monk named Gregory of Nyssa was the first to see Moses’s cloud as a cipher for the spiritual life. “Moses’s vision began with light,” he wrote. “Afterwards God spoke to him in a cloud. But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect, he saw God in the darkness.”2 In the same way, Gregory said, those of us who wish to draw near to God should not be surprised when our vision goes cloudy, for this is a sign that we are approaching the opaque splendor of God. If we decide to keep going beyond the point where our eyes or minds are any help to us, we may finally arrive at the pinnacle of the spiritual journey toward God, which exists in complete and dazzling darkness.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“Later, when I stood in front of an alter 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 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 if our communion cups were filled with consecrated wine or draft beer, as long as we bent over them long enough to recognize each other as kin.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark

“The real problem has far less to do with what is really out there than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there. The suffering comes from our reluctance to learn to walk in the dark.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“how do we develop the courage to walk in the dark if we are never asked to practice?”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“I and everything I love have come forth from the furnace of the stars by a process so full of unfathomable, life-giving grace that my earlier worrying strikes me as cheap.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark

“How many times since then have I rejected Love because it did not present itself the way I expected, in a form acceptable to me?”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark

“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?”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“The soul does not grow by addition but by subtraction,” wrote the fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people. —Carl Jung”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“While those who are frightened by the primal energy of dark emotions try to avoid them, becoming more and more cut off from the world at large, those who are willing to wrestle with angels break out of their isolation by dirtying their hands with the emotions that rattle them most.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“Without benefit of maturity or therapy, I had no way of knowing that the darkness was as much inside me as it was outside me, or that I had any power to affect its hold on me.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark

“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. You can turn on the lights if you want, but they are all artificial. The most they can do is postpone your encounter with what really matters.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“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. This is the function of religion that sells books and grows churches, Wilber says, because it strengthens the believer’s sense of self, holding out the promise of contentment to anyone who can live by this new translation. In this mode, religion offers hope that the self may be saved. 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.” The Greek word for “life” in this passage is psyche: the human breath, life, or soul. While Greek has no word for “ego” (a word that did not exist in any language before the early nineteenth century), psyche comes close. The salvation of the psyche begins with its own demise. This function of religion does not sell well, Wilber says, because it does not locate the human problem in the spiritual shortfall of the world. It locates the problem in the spiritual grasping of the self, which is always looking for ways to improve its own position. In popular American usage, Wilber says, “soul” has come to mean little more than “the ego in drag,” and much of what passes for spiritual teaching in this country is about consoling the self, not losing it. Translation is being marketed as transformation, which is why those who try to live on the spiritual equivalent of fast food have to keep going back for more and more. There is no filling a hole that was never designed to be filled, but only to be entered into. Where real transformation is concerned, Wilber says, “the self is not made content; the self is made toast.”4”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“If we could learn to be attentive every moment of our lives, he said, we would discover the world anew. We would discover that the world is completely different from what we had believed it to be. Because blindness taught him that, he listened with disbelief as the most earnest people he knew spoke about the terrible “night” into which his blindness had pushed him. “The seeing do not believe in the blind,” he concluded, which may help explain why there are so many stories in the Bible about blind people begging to be healed. Whoever wrote down those stories could see. In seminary I was taught to interpret them as teachings about spiritual blindness, but no matter how you read them, it is clear that Jesus heals only a very small percentage of those who ask for his help. There is also that strange thing he says at the end of a long healing story in John’s Gospel. “I came into this world for judgment,” he says after healing a man who has been blind from birth, “so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”12 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.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“Greenspan calls this “spiritual bypassing”—using religion to dodge the dark emotions instead of letting it lead us to embrace those dark angels as the best, most demanding spiritual teachers we may ever know.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and rising up.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“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”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“When the compressor for the air conditioning in the house turns on, I feel apologetic. I had no idea how loud it was out here, clearly interrupting a whole valley full of creatures that are trying to say something to one another.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“Let’s just say that an introverted romantic with a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder does not make the best pastor.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“All in all, the moon is a truer mirror for my soul than the sun that looks the same way every day.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“Watching them ride the waves of their own dark emotions, I learned that sadness does not sink a person; it is the energy a person spends trying to avoid sadness that does that.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“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.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“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?”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“What is it about beds at night? During the daytime a bed seems harmless enough. You can take a nap in one on a Saturday afternoon without waking up wondering how much longer you have to live.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“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.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night