Learning to Walk in the Dark

Since I am flailing instead of walking in the dark, I thought this would be good for me to read. The author, Barbara Brown Taylor, says that it is not a how-to book, but I'd guess that many people pick it up hoping that it contains instructions. And at the end, there are some coy instructions that would be given if it were a how to book: basically, become curious about your own darkness. The body of the book consists of the author's writing about becoming curious about physical darkness and her own emotional/psychic darkness. I'm sympathetic with her complaint, that mainstream Christianity does not acknowledge a place for darkness in human life, that darkness is used as a metaphor for evil so that we become afraid of darkness, even wholesome darkness. Her chapters about her excursions into various types of darkness are not How-To pieces, certainly, but they are worth pondering if, like me, you feel you are thrashing around in the dark (whatever kind of dark). It's a slender book and her writing is beautiful, but her advice is just a suggestion.

Read this book.

I am tempted to end this review there. What Barbara Brown Taylor has done in “Learning to Walk in the Dark” is to take a familiar concept and expose it in multiple ways previously unconsidered. The dark is usually a backdrop, like a good sports referee, doing its job unnoticed. Two passages sum up this background player:

“Jesus was born in a cave and rose from the dead in a cave... “The cave in which he rose from the dead is long gone covered over by the huge Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Today visitors stand in line to enter a mausoleum that looks nothing like a hole in the ground. This may be just as well, since no one knows for sure what happened there. 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.

“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...new life starts in the dark.”

p. 128
And,

“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.”

“If this primordial story of separation plays a role in our problems with darkness, that is because we turn it into a story of opposition by loading it with values that are not in the story itself. Nowhere does it say that light is good and darkness is bad. Nowhere does it say that God separated light and darkness as a test, to see which one human beings would choose. That is the fruit story, not the darkness story.”

p. 168
These passages reflect a regularity in the book that makes it a must read. Taylor recognizes the place and importance of the dark in the background and consistently draws meaning from the darkness. Darkness has been ignored and vilified as something to be avoided and ignored, and she draws us right into the middle of it, “endarkening” us as she goes. I was consistently brought to a place where I said, “I never thought of it that way.”

Read the full review: https://thetempleblog.com/2022/01/17/book-review-learning-to-walk-in-the-dark/