Learning to Walk in the Dark

Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am an unapologetic night owl, long ago having to cope with the fact that I was the only one in the family still awake in the middle of the night (scary! at age 10, but I got used to it, and then learned to love it.) I’m also left-handed (sinister!), so I appreciate the way our language equates all things good with light, and all things bad with darkness, and yet I don’t have to agree with that! This is not a “how-to” book – nothing too deep here to ponder. It is more like a journal of the author’s personal exploration of darkness and what she learned from it. Each chapter could be read as a kind of meditation as she looks at the concepts of blindness, caves, the dark madonna, or the dark night of the soul. A gentle and self-affirming book.

Book Description: Taylor has become increasingly uncomfortable with our tendency to associate all that is good with lightness and all that is evil and dangerous with darkness. Doesn’t God work in the nighttime as well? In Learning to Walk in the Dark, Taylor asks us to put aside our fears and anxieties and to explore all that God has to teach us “in the dark.” She argues that we need to move away from our “solar spirituality” and ease our way into appreciating “lunar spirituality” (since, like the moon, our experience of the light waxes and wanes). Through darkness we find courage, we understand the world in new ways, and we feel God’s presence around us, guiding us through things seen and unseen. Often, it is while we are in the dark that we grow the most. With her characteristic charm and literary wisdom, Taylor is our guide through a spirituality of the nighttime, teaching us how to find our footing in times of uncertainty and giving us strength and hope to face all of life’s challenging moments.