Darkness is God's Best Gift to You

In her book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor has a chapter about the "dark night of the soul", a term made famous by John of the Cross, a sixteenth century monk who wrote the book by that title during the 11 months that he spent in a monastery prison.

Taylor writes in this chapter about how averse we are to uncertainty and how all of our carefully crafted creeds and doctrines over the centuries have attempted to make us sure about who God is. But John of the Cross says that "one of the central functions of the dark night is to convince those who grasp after things that cannot be grasped."

She goes on to write the following about John of the Cross: "...he says that darkness is God's best gift to you, intended for your liberation. It is about freeing you from your ideas about God, your fears about God, your attachment to the benefits you have been promised for believing in God, your devotion to spiritual practices that are supposed to make you feel closer to God, your dedication to doing and believing all the right things about God, your positive and negative evaluations of yourself as a believer in God, your tactics for manipulating God, and your sure cures for doubting God.

"All of these are substitutes for God, John says. They all get in God's way...God puts out our lights to keep us safe, John says, because we are never in more danger of stumbling than when we think we know where we are going. When we can no longer see the path we are on, when we can no longer read the maps we have brought with us or sense anything in the dark that might tell us where we are, then and only then are we vulnerable to God's protection..."

Taylor ends the chapter by saying that this kind of faith "will not offer me much to hold on to. It will not give me a safe place to settle. Practicing it will require me to celebrate the sacraments of defeat and loss...I think I can live inside this cloudy evening of the soul for a while longer, where even my sense of God's absence can be a token of God's presence if I let it..."