Barbara Brown Taylor has
been active in Christian ministry for many years; she is an experienced
preacher as well as writer and instructor and has written books through which
she has drawn for herself quite a following.
All of them challenge traditional thought about spirituality. Her latest, which was recently reviewed in
Time Magazine, is entitled “Learning to Walk in the Dark.” In this published treatise she maintains, and
this is a quote from that Time Magazine article: “contemporary spirituality is too feel-good.
. .it is sometimes in the bleakest void that God is nearest.”
Such a notion might sound revolutionary,
but it takes little discernment to understand where in the course of human
events we run into circumstances which seem to offer some proof of its
validity. For instance, we have reason
to be leery when we hear the same well-meaning person, noted for her or his
cheery disposition, repeatedly reporting that “I’m doing okay” or “I’m in a
pretty good place” or “I’m all right” with no elaboration. Especially is that true when an unsmiling
silence follows the unelaborated claim. After
all, “okay” is not “golly gee wiz wonderful.”
“I’m okay” is sometimes a disguised way of saying “I’m not in the best
of places and I don’t want to talk about it.”
I have been guilty of that myself.
The power of positive thinking does not extend as far as denying the
unseen burdens of the mind that we all carry, ones that are not unloaded so
easily, however many self-help books we have read.
The larger family I grew up
in would never have shared their dark emotions or their stressful experiences
with just anyone. They were very picky
and choosy about those to whom they would open up. They kept such things to themselves; they did
not advertise. Sometimes they even hid
themselves away – bodily. I had three
grandparents who were quite practiced at the art of concealment. They did not reveal facts about themselves
that they thought would reflect badly upon them, even if those facts concealed
nothing more than that they were as human and subject to weakness and crisis as
anyone else. They had a name to protect,
a reputation! Even if they were in the
midst of a trial by fire or an agony of soul and spirit, they did not let too
much of the particulars about their condition or situation slip out. They hedged, they shaded, they modified. The unwritten guideline was to put on a happy
face, cover up the unpleasant. God will
look after me; it will all work out. The
idea that God’s help would come to them not just in the midst of depression or
doubt or crisis or confusion but by way of these things was foreign
to their thinking. “What would people
think of me, if I were too honest or confessed too much neediness?”
And the last thing they
ever wanted, something to be avoided like the plague, was giving anybody an
excuse to feel sorry for them. Of
course, they themselves did not hesitate to feel sorry for others. They would feel sorry for those poor people
over there somewhere – down the block or in another country, wherever. But nobody better consider them poor and in
need of sorry. A reputation to be
shunned! The refusal to open up and make
others a gift of your dark struggle is itself a refusal to love. I had to grow to adulthood before I knew
there was any such thing as the dark night of the soul.
Ms. Taylor points out that
people are taught from an early age to fear darkness. Parents line the pathway to the bathroom with
nightlights so that the children can find their way. Sometimes we even encourage them to sleep
with the light of the room on. This is
intended to chase away the closet monsters, to restrain the scary creatures
that sneak up on you when you are asleep. To quote the Time article again: “As we grow
older, the monsters take different shape: darkness descends when the call comes
that a loved one has cancer, months of unemployment, or a child with an addiction. Taylor’s own darkness extends to anything
that scares her, and that includes the absence of God, dementia, the melting of
polar ice caps and what it will feel like to die. . .Our culture’s ability to
tolerate sadness is weak. As
individuals, we often run away from it.”
And this is a direct quote from Taylor’s book itself: “We are supposed
to get over it, fix it, purchase something, exercise, do whatever it takes to
become less sad.”
Part of Taylor’s discipline
is seeking out dark places in which to meditate. She has spent time in caves. She takes walks at night (choose your
neighborhood carefully, things being as they now are), she watches the
moonrise. She has been known to unplug
all the electrical fixtures in her house and abide in that self-imposed darkness
for a spell. She has even sat in her
closet with the closet door shut. She
reasons that “God and darkness have been friends for a long time.” God appeared to Abraham in the night
promising him more descendents than the stars he was looking at. The exodus from Egypt happened at night. God delivered the Ten Commandments on a dark
mountain. Paul’s conversion happened
after he lost his eyesight. To run from
darkness is to run away from God. And
most of the world’s major religions have something to say about finding God in
the shadows.
Her most striking statement
has to do with feelings of unworthiness due to doubts and fears. “For many years I thought my questions and my
doubt and my sense of God’s absence were all signs of my lack of faith, but now
I know this is the way the life of the spirit goes.” Do we get that? Doubt and questioning are part and parcel of
the spiritual life, not anathema to it.
Now
this does not mean becoming morbidly fascinated with irksome or depressing or
defeatist or negative thoughts. Wallowing
is something else. I hate to think of
how much during my lifetime, when I have been separated from a sense of God, I
have spoken or acted in such a way that I have reinforced the negativity of
others around me. I have been the misery
that loved the company of other peoples’ misery. Sometimes we can do this very subtly – a
careless look in the eye or a careless little dollop of disdain or fatalism or
what might pass for fatalism in voice or attitude. I don’t think Taylor is talking about that
sort of thing – casting a cloak or mantle of bitter-sweetness over everything
and everyone. She speaks of that which
she thinks is supposed to be good as a spiritual discipline, not the things
that morbid people say and do as a form of self-indulgence.
Of
course, the other side of all this is the fact that darkness will not be a gift
to us unless we know that is truly what we are experiencing. People can live in spiritual darkness so long
that they cease to realize that that is what it is. There was a book written during the 1960s
with the odd title “Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up to Me!” The darkness can seem like light. We humans create big flashy neon signs and
cascades of splashy color and artificial illumination to pass for the light
that is gone out of us. Night life per
se has never held any fascination for me.
I find it superficial in its promise of freedom and frivolity and
relaxation. But many do chase after
it.
The
spiritual life, whatever the form of faith practice, is a mixture of Light and
Darkness. The Apostle Paul hit that nail
on the head when he said, “Now we see through a dark reflective glass,” as
opposed to whatever we see after we stop breathing. It
does appear that God in a sense expects us to be in the dark – not the darkness
engendered by evil but the darkness engendered by partial knowledge. We have to distinguish between moral darkness
and the darkness created by limited understanding, the blurriness of human,
finite awareness.
I
once composed this poetic prayer. In it
I talk to Light and Darkness, as if they were persons – Light first, then
Darkness. I end with it:
Oh
Light, oh Light,
Under
your beam we have felt condemned to work and sweat. Drenched in the visibility you impart, we
have been smug and complacent and imputed to our eyes the wisdom of omniscient
gods. You we sometimes wish to blame for
our illusions of grandeur. Of you we
have asked miracles. You we have
expected to free us from fear and loneliness, to cancel out our wounds and our
debts, to erase our hatreds, to resolve our dilemmas, to soothe all our
qualms. You we want to hold accountable
for our happiness, for the enlivening of expectation, for salvation, for the
utopia of which we never cease to dream.
We have silently chastised you for your alleged desertion of us, when
without your resistance you give place to Darkness and seemingly abandoned us
to it. But in this moment we know that
you are indeed unique among blessings, not the be-all and end-all
of them.
Without
you we would never know delirious joy and passion. Under your bright fire we are incited to run
and walk and dance and jump. By you our
energies are called forth. We go forth
to explore, to experience, to discover, to create. By your lamp we build, we rearrange the universe
in search of healing enterprises and arrangements of matter and phenomena that
portend justice and productivity on behalf of human need. Under your aegis, oh Light, we know love. We see our fellow creatures at their noble
best.
It
is you who illumines the path along which peoples and nations encounter each
other. Among your grand entourage our
hands see to reach out and touch surfaces and shapes and the warm satisfaction
of other hands, other hearts, other kinships of need reaching for us. From your infusion we gain confidence. In your radiant, enervating ambience we fling
ourselves into labors of love, undergo the reward of accomplished pursuits and
catharses that enlighten our whole being.
You,
oh Light, have shown us wonders we cannot comprehend. You have raised us to pinnacles of
truth. By you we obtain visions and
learn to walk the world in faith.
Oh
Darkness, oh, Darkness,
You
have made us tremble. Under your spell
we have imagined shapeless and faceless horrors. In your deep bosom we have known the meaning
of fear and doubt, our eyes sealed shut by shadows that cannot be erased. We have thought of you as evil, a friend only
to demons and workers of iniquity. To
you we have brought our fatigue, our stress, our sulking hatreds, our languor,
and our deep and abiding suspicions. You
have been our mute and captive audience.
In your hearing we have soliloquized grievances with the world that the
world will never hear.
Often
we have ignored you and spurned you with our weaponry of artificial light. Our noise, our caprices, our frantic
restlessness driving us to indulgence of body and mind beyond moderation have
helped us forget you were there at all.
But we know that you are a blessing, not a scourge, that whatever horror
there may be is in us. We have taught
ourselves fear and doubt. Shadows are of
our own making, if indeed they are not the chosen object of our fascination and
sometime obsession. The evil we know is
not your creation. It is we who befriend
iniquity.
You,
oh Darkness, we have come to love so late.
Late in our lives we have made peace with you and heard your message to
us in the midnight beating of our hearts.
Without you we would never have known introspection. Because of you we have eyes within as well as
without. It is you who leads us to take
comfort from solitude. It is you who
draws us closer to loved ones, who catalyzes us toward intimacy and sleep and
meditative second thoughts. It is you,
Darkness, who breaks the fevered thrust of our momentum and puts us in gentle
touch with our mortality. Under your
inspiration we wrestle and subdue the urgencies of conscience and flesh and
private dilemma. Without duress or
chicanery you allow us to see ourselves in the mirror of disquietude and find
strength to ennoble our own quiet needing.
By your silent blanketing of our eyes, our window of the soul, you
inspire us to find our own way to God’s illuminating presence.
Darkness
and Light – Light and Darkness, we bless you both. We embrace you both. We acknowledge your dual power and press on
with endless vigor to give it shape all the days and nights of our lives. Amen!
To read other entries in my
blog, please consult its website:
enspiritus.blogspot.com. To learn
about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.
