By: Barbara Brown Taylor
Book Report by: Bryn Clark
Darkness isn’t generally something we associate with goodness. Nighttime is often seen as cold, bleak and terrifying. Much of our technology is designed to fill the night with artificial light. The same is true when darkness is used as a metaphor. For instance, in Christianity, “spiritual darkness” is something to avoid at all costs. In the introduction to the Gospel of John, incarnation is described as the defeat of darkness by Christ’s light.
In Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor addresses these interpretations of darkness and gently nudges readers deeper into their own hearts and into the wilderness out their backdoor. “Darkness,” Taylor writes, “is shorthand for anything that scares me—either because I am sure that I do not have the resources to survive it or I do not want to find out.”¹ Darkness, Taylor posits, is not inherently bad or dangerous but is simply unknown.
Throughout the book, Taylor cites several instances in which the darkness of nature is misunderstood and, as a result, is overlooked or abused. Taylor writes of numerous species of sea turtles which confuse city lights along the shoreline with the moon and end up dragging themselves inland instead of toward the ocean. Thousands of hatchlings perish this way each year. Likewise, in every major city across the globe, indigenous bird species are threatened by the presence of lights on skyscrapers. It’s not just moths who are drawn to light. Thousands of birds collide with these buildings and often do not survive it—all because of our desire to squelch darkness with light.²
The same applies on an emotional level. “Dark thoughts” is a phrase that references emotions such as anger, brokenness and despair. By arbitrarily associating these emotions with darkness, which we presume to be negative, we pit ourselves against our emotions. Yet Christ experienced these “dark” emotions. He experienced anger in Matthew 21, despair in Luke 22, and brokenness and torment in Matthew 27:46. Taylor argues that it is our “inability to bear dark emotions” (her own emphasis) that causes many of our most significant problems, not the emotions themselves.³
Thus, Taylor advocates for all that is to be gained by pressing fear out of our interactions with darkness, opting for curiosity instead. Taylor finds a richness that can only be felt and understood from within physical and metaphorical darkness. A uniquely profound beauty emerges toward the end of the book when Taylor converses with St. John of the Cross and his famous coining of “dark night of the soul.” It is through embracing feelings of doubt and despair that Taylor draws out a kind of beauty that can only be known by those who are willing to sit in the deepest and darkest of caves and wait. A spiritual life that does not step into darkness with a brave, humble intentionality cannot, Taylor offers, experience a specific kind of beauty God has ordained for such places.
Now let’s take this outside.
“There is a tendency,” states Chet Raymo in the book’s epigraph “for us to flee from the wild silence and the wild dark.” Even on programs like those at La Vida, light is a necessity. Check the packing list for any La Vida outing; a headlamp will be on the list. Even in programs that embrace nature, we insist on the necessity of artificial light, both in terms of safety and convenience.
And yet, some of the most powerful and spiritually poignant moments of my life have taken place in darkness. I think of countless nights in the Adirondacks, staying up until midnight just to see the Milky Way stretched across the heavens.
Likewise, in college I took a weekend mountain-biking course. On the last night of the course, we strapped headlamps onto our helmets. Our instructor led us into the woods on a wide dirt path. He told us to spread out and find a good pace. Then, he said, “On the count of three, turn off your headlamps. One. . . Two. . . Three. . .”
The initial shock was close to panic. But then came peace. Because I could see, see in ways I didn’t think possible. “It’s kind of like faith,” the instructor said. I’ll never forget it.
Light is not bad. That’s not Taylor’s point. Nor should we embrace everything that can be found in darkness. But Learning to Walk in the Dark reminds us that when we attempt to outshine the stars, we’ve lost something. It’s like replacing a face-to-face conversation with one hand via text, only on an infinitely larger cosmological scale.
And in terms of faith, hope is not that darkness is defeated by light. To the contrary, hope is all the greater. Hope is the faith that darkness and light are together within God’s perfect domain. The God of daylight is the God of starlight and the God of faith sustains us in doubt. God reveals Godself in unique ways in both, to such an extent that it would be a shame to miss out on either.
Embrace the darkness, Taylor proposes. Turn off your headlamp. Ask hard questions. Lean into the suffering and hurt of the world. Sit in silence in a dark cave. Learn to see the world with the lights off.
¹From the inside cover
³Pg. 78