Trusting the Dark

Have it All

“At this point, I am more afraid of what I might leave out instead of what I might let in. 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.”

Barbara Brown Taylor (Learning to Walk in the Dark)

I am just finishing, reluctantly, Barbara Brown Taylor's book about finding one's way in darkness, which if you haven't read it, I highly recommend. Her point is that we, who are made in the image of God, cannot escape the fullness of God—and that includes darkness as well as light. We are schooled from birth to seek the light, to praise the light, and to fear darkness, both our own and others, and the actual physical darkness of night. We have built it into our psyches that there is danger, and even evil, lurking in darkness, and we have created a world in which physical darkness is quite difficult to find. We light our streets, our homes, our cities with illumination so strong it can be seen from space. We tell ghost stories, and fairy tales, and write novels, and make movies and television shows about fearful things that go bump in the night.

Learning to walk in the dark requires a willingness to trust that safety resides within you. That ginned up fear is the problem, and not the reality. We have eyes that adjust to the dark if we let them, and other senses that assist. We have moonlight and stars that light the night, which, admittedly, are difficult to see in our cities because of artificial illumination. In spite of all this, we have a great romance with the night. Our deep affinity for the diffuse light of the moon, and the relative darkness of night, was recently in evidence when millions of people all around the world watched the eclipse of the Super Moon. Darkness is not the enemy. Fear is the enemy.

Dispelling our fear of inner and outer darkness, seeing it as the normal rhythm of an Earthling, would go a long way toward curing our obsession with light. Because we are of the earth, we are subject to the rhythms of the planet—the cycles of the moon, the rising and ebbing of the tides, the circle of the seasons. We need not fear them, but rise with them, allow their flow, and trust that we are as capable as the black bear and the stately elk to find our way in the dark as well as the light. We can have it all, if we are willing to let go of fear.

                                                 In the Spirit,

                                                     Jane