Barbara Brown Taylor ‘76 M.Div. explores the dark, on the cover of TIME

“The dark night is God’s best gift to you, intended for your liberation.”

Barbara Brown Taylor’s new book Learning to Walk in the Dark is creating a stir by exploring a topic that is nearly taboo in the history of Christianity, darkness.

Barbara Brown Taylor Photo courtesy Piedmont College

Taylor ’76 M.Div. has been named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people, appearing in the May 5 issue, and was featured in the cover story of TIME’s April 28 issue, “Finding God in the Dark.” TIME praises her as a writer of spiritual non-fiction that rivals Frederick Buechner and C.S. Lewis.

Taylor “has always inhabited the edge of mainstream Christian spirituality,” the magazine says.

“Her latest book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, is her 13th, and in it she urges believers and nonbelievers alike to dive into the deepest shadows of their lives in order to confront their worst fears and to find strength for life’s journey,” writes TIME’s Elizabeth Dias. “In the process, she adds, their faith may deepen.” With this book, Taylor heads into the shadows of human experience, where rigid dichotomies are collapsed, and glimmers of an emerging spiritual consciousness are visible.

A long-time member of the Yale Divinity Board of Advisors and a frequent guest at YDS, Taylor says she first came to divinity school to be a writer. But her experience at YDS was one of dramatic transformation. In a YDS fundraising article, she wrote, “Education has opened the world to me, and it has opened more worlds to me than anything I could have imagined. The rich sea of resources and people I met at Yale stay with me always.”

Dean Gregory E. Sterling writes, “Barbara has taken a traditional grounding in theology—an experience that she relished—and combined it with a refreshing honesty in thinking about life to challenge us to reflect on our own faith and the role of the church.”

At Yale she found her vocation as a priest, preacher, teacher and author, eventually writing 13 books, including the New York Times bestseller An Altar in the World. She is now the Butman Professor of Religion at Piedmont College in Georgia.

Taylor gave the 1997 Lyman R. Beecher Lectures entitled “Famine in the Land: Homiletical Restraint and the Silence of God,” resulting in her book When God is Silent. In 1993 she was awarded an alumni awarded for Distinction in Theological Education.

“Barbara is today what Frederick Buechner was to an earlier generation: a great preacher, theologian, and a gifted writer,” says Sterling. “She is passionate about faith and unafraid to rethink it. We need more of this in churches, not less.”

Christian theology, she believes, has unfortunately embedded fear of the dark in our society. “It divides every day in two, pitting the light part against the dark part. It tucks all the sinister stuff into the dark part, identifying God with the sunny part,” she writes. “Humans do not easily relinquish our control over how dark or bright it is, either in our houses or in our souls. Add Christian teaching to our natural fear of the dark and the aversion becomes sanctified.”

“If we turn away from darkness on principle, doing everything we can to avoid it because there is simply no telling what it contains, isn’t there a chance that what we are running from is God?”

Through her book, she guides readers into the night, into dark caves, and into outer darkness, in search of the mysteries of God that our well-lit, wired and noisy “full solar” world has banished.

But, Taylor is not just concerned with spiritual mysteries; her exploration of darkness is also a critique of American obsession with consumption, the new and the bright. For her, darkness is the where we have banished our fears, and stored the sorrow that comes from neglecting the whole of creation. She writes, “If outer darkness is the cloud where we store our inner fears, how much will the real world suffer from our collective fear of the dark?”

If you are wondering how to speak to a society that has abandoned Christian institutions and outmoded rituals, and rote systems of belief, Learning to Walk in the Dark is a good place to start. In her searching is woven a longing and vision for an emerging spirituality. “The one thing most emerging Christians will say is that the faith they inherited from their elders is all worn out,” Taylor writes. In the company of Karen Armstrong, Phyllis Tickle, and Harvey Cox, Taylor believes new movements within Christianity hold promise for reviving the faith by embracing the interconnectedness of the planet, finding inspiration in the world’s religions, in ancient practices, and learning from nature. 

In the fall of 2013 Taylor discussed the themes of Learning to Walk in the Dark at the Rothko Chapel, which houses a suite of 14 paintings by Marc Rothko. The canvasses, appearing nearly black on quick glance, come alive with a dark palette of deep blues, purples, reds, and shadows that seem offer a world to explore. As she describes them, “The darkness of these panels is the luminous kind and not the bossy kind. They don’t tell me what to see. They make room for me to see whatever I see, even if that is gold in the dark.”

That metaphor is an apt companion as Taylor leads her readers into the dark, where spiritual insights await. Her path is moonlit and lined with evening primrose, gardenias and white rosebuds. “I have been given the gift of lunar spirituality, in which the divine light available to me waxes and wanes with the season.” Her path leads out into the shadows of Christian faith, attuned especially to this era of global spiritual change. There are no warmly lit chapels or timeworn rituals here, just wind and stars, nature sounds and smells, and mysterious glimmers.