You can download a PDF of this week’s reflection here. 

True to her statement at the beginning of Learning to Walk In the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor follows the lunar cycle through the course of her book, walking us through each phase of darkness. And so we find ourselves nearing the end, turning the page to chapter 9, and a full moon. 

Chapter 9, titled Our Lady of the Underground, is the final chapter of the book, and on the first page we find ourselves being led by Taylor, to contemplate our relationship with the moon.  Taylor admits that, although she has woken to watch many suns rise over the years, she has never taken time to experience a moonrise. And so, she makes plans to go and watch the moon rise for the first time in her memory. Naturally, the experience is used by Taylor to allude to a deeper spiritual meaning, and so she starts her explanation by pointing out the effect that observing the moon has on our understanding of our role in the universe. There is nothing else like it, no comparison, to use to explain the wonder of the moon, and how it can remind you of your place. It is a creation of God, full of glory and splendor that is incomparable to anything our minds can imagine, and yet, we can only see it when the sun is absent. This beautiful ornament in the sky, guide, and guardian is only visible to us when it is dark. The moon, a beautiful gift, is too often missed because we are just too busy, and too engulfed by light, to take a step back and see what the darkness has to offer us. Taylor equates the moon, and it’s phases, to a perfect symbol of our relationship with God, waxing and waning, going in cycles, and always there even when it cannot be seen.

The moon leads us, with Taylor; to Notre Dame de Chartres the topic drifts to Mary. Taylor approaches Mary by connecting herself, Mary, and the rest of cis women to the lunar cycle that shapes their lives. With this Taylor admits that she feels sometimes that Mary understands her more that Jesus does, because this common thread unites them. As Taylor walks us through Chartres Cathedral, she further elaborates on her relationship with Mary, and the things Mary has led her to understanding. Our Lady of the Underground resides in the basement of Chartres Cathedral, and is where Taylor ends up in her exploration.

As she concludes her final chapter, Taylor notes that several lessons she has taken away from her relationship with the Mary at Chartres, or The Lady of the Underground. Like a wise mother, Mary teaches us that it is darkness that often calls us to slow down, and take smaller, more intentional steps. Also, in the darkness we find ourselves needing to confront fears that don’t present in the light of day, and what Mary teaches us is that perhaps the darkness is what we need to fully acknowledge those struggles, and finally work our way through understanding them.

It is only in finding God in the dark, that we will ever be able to complete our experience in our relationship with The Master of the Universe. We have been taught the methods of walking in the dark, and now it is time to try it on our own feet.  Let us go in peace, awareness, and confidence, setting out to find what lies for us just beyond the light.

Click here to download a PDF of this week’s reflection. 

We began this walk in to the dark with an astrological event, the Presides meteor shower, so it seems only fitting we head towards the end of this books study with another one. Tonight, Sunday September 27 (or early September 28 for some of you), we will experience a supermoon total lunar eclipse, an event that has not happened in 30 years and will not occur again until 2033. Not only will we experience the rusty red glow of the moon as the sunlight is scattered by the Earth’s atmosphere, we will experience it while the moon is a mere 226,000 miles away from the Earth and will appear 14% bigger and 30% brighter. Jackie Faherty, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science, said in a September 25 National Public Radio interview; “Basically we like to think of the color of the total lunar eclipse being the reflection of all of the sunsets and the sunrises that are going on on Earth at that time.” She goes on to say “It’s always a little bit scary when an astronomical body that you’re so used to seeing in the sky starts to disappear on you. But it’s not going away. It’s just a passing into the shadow of the Earth.”

As we have wrestled with our darkness over the past few weeks it seems fitting for the earth and moon to wrestle with its own darkness. Tonight the sky will grow dark and glow with a Biblical eeriness. With our scientific understanding an our ability to control light and dark with electric lights we are no longer afraid of such astrological events, but it is no wonder that an eclipse, lunar or solar, have been used to mark significant Biblical events from the death of Jesus to predictions for his earthly return. I believe there is something liminal about the night in general, but even more so with such unique events. The moon has drawn close to the earth and it’s comforting white/blue glow will become red, there is something holy about that. The stars will shine more brightly without the competition from the moon our lunar rhythms will be shaken.

As Barbra Brown Taylor heads out to the woods to live 12 hours by the rhythm of the night sky she announces her readiness to listen to God, yet no actual voice breaks the silence of the woods. Knowing that “direct answers, clear guidance and specific tasks” are rarely offered by God, she accepts the “peaceful darkness as a token of divine presence.” What token of divine presence might we receive as we head outside in the deep dark tonight?

You can download a PDF of this week’s reflection here.

How do we conquer our dark nights?

As I have ventured through Learning to Walk in the Dark, I have found myself experiencing a deep sense of healing and understanding. This feeling was with me as I started chapter 7 of Barbra Brown Taylor’s book, and just life chapters before, The Dark Night of the Soul did not disappoint.

Chapter 7 begins with a discussion of part of life that is all too familiar to most of us, that being time in our lives when clouds seem to descend from the heavens, and we are caught up in suffocating darkness. Each dark time is unique to us, Taylor states, and according to her the only way out of a dark night is by surrendering ourselves to go through it. We have no choice of when our dark nights happen. The choice we do have is how we choose to deal with each situation. Choosing to walk through the darkness, instead of running from it, because each of our darknesses is tailored to us, specially fitted with a non-transferable policy. The impact of that statement in particular hit harder than I had imagined it would

for me, as I have been grappling with my own dark night recently, and finding that one of my greatest struggles is allowing myself to experience these parts of my life, truly feel my emotions, and be fully present in my journey. I held Taylor’s insight carefully, another gem to tuck in my bag as I push forward. So, with that lesson on confrontation of dark nights, Taylor moves on to further elaborate on the essence of our dark experiences.

Shifting gears, Taylor then launches in to the story of John of the Cross. The story of John elaborated on the experiences about which Taylor talks, and sets the scene for the rest of the chapter. As a prisoner for living his faith in a way contrary to that of the church at the time, John faced his own dark night. While in prison John wrote his book The Dark Night of the Soul, which was a recollection of his experience in the dark, and his relationship with the dark whilst actively and joyfully seeking the gift he knew was wrapped in the darkness.

But how could this idea relate to personal faith, and the larger church? Taylor ties her previous discussion to this question by pointing out the apparent “dark night” that the church is going through in present day. Also, she touches on how our own personal questioning of our faith may be a signal to be searching for newness in the darkness.

As far as the church is concerned, Taylor proposes that perhaps this dark night for Christianity is a signal to purge what is not working, and start looking for ways to make the church relevant again. In terms of personal faith, in times when we find ourselves rejecting rituals and doctrine we have never questioned before, and questioning more than ever the foundation on which our faith is built, it is possible we are being called to be transformed through our confusion.

Taylor wraps up the chapter with one last statement that struck me. “When depression passes, all is restored; when the dark night passes, all is transformed.”As with previous chapters, many parts of Taylor’s writing in chapter 7 resonated with me. Some of the concepts I found most significant were:

The need to walk through dark nights, knowing they are times given by God as opportunities for transformation.

Knowing that each of my dark nights is meant for me, and therefore I must receive them with joy and anticipation.

Understanding that growth in dark nights also involves growing out of things, and it is OK to move on from old shells that once held your definition of faith.

I hope that as you read chapter 7, you are able to find parts that resonate with you, just as they did with me, and come away from your reading ready to confront your dark nights, and excited to grow.

Questions to consider:

Have you thanked God for important dark nights in your life?

What in your life might be acting as a “God substitute,” keeping you from seeing and knowing your true purpose?

Sarandon Smith is a student at Manchester University and is an Open Table Coop board member. 

You can download a PDF of this week’s reflection here.

“While I am looking for something large, bright, and unmistakably holy, God slips something small, dark and apparently negligible in my pocket, How many other treasures have I walked right by because they did not meet my standards?” Learning to Walk in the Dark, page 130

I spent this last week with 900 older adults on the banks of Lake Junalaska in the mountains of North Carolina as we gathered for the Church of the Brethren National Older Adult Conference (NOAC). Together we worshiped, sang, prayed, listened, learned, hugged, cried, laughed until we cried and were swept away by the Holy Spirit. Now, just for the sake of full disclosure, I am about 21 years to young to attend NOAC. I was invited to attend to lead an Interest Session and to support and help throughout the week. It is a coveted invitation indeed and it was a pleasure to serve in that capacity. Leading up to the conference I would excitedly tell some of my friends that I would be spending the week with older adults and I got some pretty funny looks. It seems hangout with “old people” isn’t a normal thing to get so excited about.

In chapter 6 of Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbra Brown Taylor finds her self exploring a cave. Wowed by the quiet darkness. As she explores one particular corner she discovers “a long thin fissure in the rock that is full of tiny crystals, everyone of them catching the light [from her headlamp] and tossing it back and forth.” She picks up one particularly glittery crystal that had broken off and sticks it in her backpack. Later that night back at home, she pulls it out and looks at it under the light of her bedside lamp, to her wonder it looks like a piece of gravel, nothing spectacular and certainly not glittery. She turns off the lamp and instead examines the stone with a small penlight, in the dark room with just a little bit of light the stone glistens and shines.

Some of the folks I spent the week with are a little slower than they would like, their knees/hips/feet don’t work as well as they once did. Their faces are accentuated by wrinkles and laugh-lines. Often in our world they are overlooked and ignored as we “younger” folks speed by. During this last week I was given the opportunity to slow down, sit down and simply be. I met some wonderful people, I heard some incredible stories and I saw some of the most brilliant glittering I have ever seen. Each one of them shining and dancing under the light of the Holy Spirit.

If you want to catch up on all that happened at NOAC you can find the daily review of events and NOAC News here: http://www.brethren.org/news/2015/noac

You can download a PDF of this week’s reflection here.

When was the last time you read the Creation Story in Genesis? Or actually the two creation stories in Genesis. As I started my Intro to Old Testament class this semester we naturally began at the beginning, spending a week studying Genesis 1-11. I was amazed to really notice that we are told that even before God creates the Sun, there is light and dark. Where did the light come from? What would that kind of pre-darkness have been like? Oppressive darkness? Calm darkness? I realize that of all there is to unpack in the first several chapters of the biblical narrative this is hardly the place to spend much time, but it struck me as surprising that I’d never noticed that before. It is easy to overlook and underestimate the darkness.

In this chapter I enjoyed Barbara Brown Taylor’s detailed description of the Blinderkuh Restaurant and the “Dialogue in the Dark” exhibit. Not only did I find the experiences fascinating, I appreciated the perspective of “seeing” (our english language is so limiting!) the world through our other senses. I have been guilty of assuming that folks who are vision impaired are missing out on something. A gravely inaccurate assumption on my part. After this chapter, I believe that I am the one who is missing out on something. Since I don’t have a Blinderkuh or Opaque restaurant nearby I set out to see if I could experience a small taste of what that might be like. I wear corrective lenses, glasses or contacts, all the time. Colorful blurry shapes, like someone spilled water on a painting, is all that I can see without them. As I was preparing dinner this week I took off my glasses. First off, I want to mention that I am fully aware that blurry vision is not blindness and I would not assume to compare the two, but I hoped by taking off my glasses I might shift my reliance on visual cues and trust my other senses.

My kitchen is a space I am keenly familiar with and I was preparing a recipe I had made many times. I wanted to see if my limiting my sight if I might notice something new. By taking off my glasses I was forcing myself to trust that my hands knew how handle a knife even though I couldn’t see my fingers and that I could follow a recipe simply by taste. I found that I was better able to focus. I wasn’t checking my phone, or trying to start a load of laundry at the same time. I was just cooking. As a perpetual multi-tasker it was a nice break and almost relaxing to focus on only one task. It was an interesting experiment, dinner turned out just fine and all of my fingers remained intact. If I am ever feeling overwhelmed by life I think it might be a good idea to just take off my glasses for a while. Limit my perspective to what is in front of me and focus.

You can download a PDF of this week’s reflection here.

A recent New Yorker article outlined, in great detail, the thing that runs through my head when I can’t sleep at night. Having woken up for any myriad of reasons I lay there as my mind begins to wonder and eventually, without fail, I end up in the same terrifying cycle.

“Soon after [the] shaking begins, the electrical grid will fail, likely everywhere west of the Cascades and possibly well beyond… In theory, those who are at home when it hits should be safest; it is easy and relatively inexpensive to seismically safeguard a private dwelling. But, lulled into nonchalance by their seemingly benign environment, most people in the Pacific Northwest have not done so. That nonchalance will shatter instantly. So will everything made of glass.”

The article by Kathryn Schultz published in June 2015 details the history of the Cascadia subduction zone, which runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada. Based on the most recent Cascade earthquake, a magnitude-9.0 on January 26, 1700, scientist can predict the most likely outcome of the impending earthquake.

“The shaking from the Cascadia quake will set off landslides throughout the region,… It will also induce a process called liquefaction, whereby seemingly solid ground starts behaving like a liquid, to the detriment of anything on top of it. … Together, the sloshing, sliding, and shaking will trigger fires, flooding, pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous-material spills. …Four to six minutes after the dogs start barking, the shaking will subside. For another few minutes, the region, upended, will continue to fall apart on its own. Then the wave will arrive, and the real destruction will begin.”

I stopped reading after that. Having seen videos of 2011 Japan earthquake I know how this story ends. As I’m laying in bed unable to fall asleep I am wrought with anxiety over the emergency box we don’t have packed and the seismic straps we haven’t installed on our foundation yet.  Will it really matter if it is as bad as they say? What is it about the darkness of the middle of the night that our deepest fears and greatest anxieties emerge? How do we face our beds at the end of each day with that looming anxiety?

As Barbra Brown Taylor explores, I think we have to be willing to wrestle with our anxiety and fear by the light of day too. I’m not sure that packing an emergency box will alleviate my seismic anxiety, but there is something important about taking it out of the darkness and looking at it in the full light of day. For weeks following the publication of Schultz’s article the impending earthquake was all the Pacific Northwest could talk about. Pre-made emergency kits flew off the shelves and we discussed our emergency plans over dinners and in staff meetings. A few months later, we are lulled back into nonchalance by our “seemingly benign environment”.  But I think we will all be safer in the long run if we can keep talking about it. We have a lot of work to do to prepare our buildings, roads and lives to survive the really-big one. We can not relegate it to the darkness of our bedrooms.

If you want to read the article in it’s entirety you can find it here: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one

You can download a PDF of this week’s reflection here.

Just before getting Brown Taylor’s latest book, I was pondering the map of the Earth from space that shows how brightly lit the richest lands are. The United States’ borders being completely obvious in our flagrant use of lighting, all day and night. I am the one the neighbors comment about, saying, “It is so dark at your house at night that I never know if you are home.”  I am unplugging any possible appliance, especially if it has a light (blinking lights are pretty well relegated the same status as glitter and walking on glass.)  Brown Taylor’s love affair with the dark helps me know I am not alone. I yearn for the physical dark, for ways to connect to nature…even though I as guilty as the next person to run away from my interior fears.

My family is just getting back to our ‘routine’ from a recent Sabbath Rest that took us overseas for eight weeks. We traveled from Morocco to the Catalonian region in Spain, then on to Italy for a month before winding our way through the length of Croatia (and other beautiful neighboring countries) and a final week in Turkey. I have been a tiny part of so many beautiful encounters with people, lands, waters and other beings and I am truly grateful. I am still reintegrating and feeling a bit out of my groove, as if I am walking at one pace while the treadmill is moving at a slightly faster pace. After many sincere greetings of “welcome back” I said as naturally as if I had said this new-to-me-phrase a hundred times, “I think I need to be welcomed forward.”

Last week I recounted to a wise farmer friend that one of my favorite aspects of the Mediterranean adventure was seeing the stars, moon, planets and Milky Way. At first seeing the real sky was as almost a surprise and then greeted with intentionality as I engaged with the movement in the night sky.  I marveled how deeply I missed really noticing, let alone being able to just see, the stars.  From the same viewpoint each night for three weeks on a hill in the farmland of Tuscany, Italy I saw from one clear perspective, the dance of the moon, Jupiter and Venus, so brilliant and seemingly intimate. My long-time friend and I mourned the loss of the night and seeing the night sky due to light pollution, even in rural Indiana where we had once worked together at a church camp.  And he reminded me that when our utter reliance on fossil fuels fails, it will be the brightly lit parts of the map that are in shock while the majority of the world wakes to a new sunrise and greets the new days as any day before it. It won’t be so jarring to welcome forward a way of living in the dark and the light.

How might we be part of the world, part of the galaxy, and welcome forward a way for humans, birds, and animals to be back in the natural rhythm of night and day, rest and activity, reflection and response?  Truly the important work starts with ourselves. Just like proclaiming to a pacifist means recognizing the best and the worst possibilities inside ourselves, learning to walk in the dark, as the chapter notes, means noticing deeply why we may be afraid to face the dark rather than embrace it.  Perhaps where you are, you have been watching the meteor showers of Perseus this month…or perhaps wishing you could gaze on the starry skies, or merely wish you remembered the joys of these summer nights in the midst of a frenetic schedule. What are you noticing within as you make space to notice the great beyond?

Kimberly Koczan-Flory is a member of the OTC Board and is a spiritual guide based in Fort Wayne, IN. She is also an educator for sustainable food systems and holistic living.

You can download a PDF of this week’s reflection here. 

You needn’t look long before finding a reference to light or dark in our Christian Scriptures, prayers, and hymns. Taylor has collected quite a few, but you’re probably already thinking of some yourself, from Jesus as the Light of the World to the face of the darkness over which the Creator’s Spirit blew. (During my online conversation about the book, with Elizabeth Ullery Swenson in Living Stream CoB worship last week, the congregation came up with these and more.)

It seems like an obvious truth that when our Creator separated light and darkness, in that primordial stew of being told of in Genesis, that it was a division of good from evil.  Yet our own experiences reveal that the stark dualism of dark and light can obscure our vision of the subtler hues of Truth: the multiple meanings of any symbol, such as light or darkness.  Or that these are symbols and thus extricable from what they are used to signify, especially good and evil.

In the world around us, we witness examples of evil emerging in light: the flash of an atomic bomb decimating cities. We witness the evil of racial hierarchies founded on an assumption that ‘white’ (European) skin connoted the goodness of Light – at the expense of those people labelled ‘dark.’  From our own lived reality in this world, we know that the dichotomy of dark and light is false – and can have dangerous implications.

Our own Christian traditions include references to the goodness of dark as well:

• the space underground where seeds scattered and sown can take root and grow;
• the nighttime when people and the earth get a chance to halt their labors and rest, spending time with God;
• the dark sky where a multiplicity of stars can speak God’s promise to Abraham;
• the night when an angel can wrestle Jacob and bestow on him a new identity;
• the time of sleep when God can communicate in dreams to Joseph .

Taylor’s book is not the first to gaze into the sacred within darkness, but it is nonetheless a welcome journey.

_________

But I have been especially drawn to Taylor’s concept of lunar spirituality. On one level, I just love her calling out its opposite: solar spirituality, that glib, shallow-seeming religious worldview so many of us have encountered, in which the hard parts of our lives are seen as our own moral failings (and possibly contagious).  The depths of our pain are minimized or explained away.  The reality of darkness is denied.

• God never gives us more than we can handle.
• God has a plan.

Or, for the more liberal or secular, a different version of the same message:

• You think that’s bad?  Listen to what I went through, and I made it through.
• You’ll grow out of it.  Everyone has to face struggle.
• Maybe you should try…./should have tried….

That solar-obsessed theology has no space for shadow. It’s a simple theology: follow the sunlight.  It feels good, and even warm.  But it is incomplete. Our theology, to be full in its Truth, must have space for the half of the day when the sun is not up.

You wouldn’t think this would be so hard for a faith tradition grounded in a moment of brutality and despair: Christ’s crucifixion. But often, Christians have interpreted the ending of that story – Christ’s resurrection – as erasing, justifying, or minimizing the horrors of the murder that preceded it.  And all the horrors that have come ever since. No wonder some Christians (and others) don’t seem ready to hear about anyone still living through their time in the tomb. 

Taylor takes on a bold but worthy goal of finding ways to incorporate those ‘dark’ times of our lives into our total theology, so that we can embrace both the solar and lunar elements of our spirituality and ourselves.

_________

Finally, I was also drawn to her lunar spirituality just because of the moon itself. I’ve been noticing the moon more lately, and appreciating its monthly rhythm overlapping the daily and annual rhythms of the sun.  Together, they make concentric spheres of time wrapping around us and carrying us through natural, blessed cycles of life.

[I want to correct any wrong impression from this reflection: I do indeed love the sun!  At the time of year when days are long, though growing shorter, I am noticing the sun in its course as well.  And with gratitude, knowing how much I will miss it in a few months’ time.]

This week, the Perseid meteor show arrives, with a rare occasion for exceptional visibility, because this week of maximum meteors syncs up with the week of the New Moon.  And less moonlight means better visibility for the fainter stars and meteor showers. It’s like a subset of the phenomenon of the daily rhythm: until the sunlight sets, we can’t see stars; as moonlight dims, we see brighter showers. 

The night sky offers us a fitting reminder that we comprehend better when we see from many perspectives, in many ways, and over time, before assuming that what we see right before us is all there is to see.

If we can understand that with the stars and moon and sun, perhaps it is a lesson we will learn as well for the challenges we face in our lives.  Perhaps with time and multiple perspectives, we will be able to learn from even the ‘darkness’ we walk through.  It won’t take away the depth of pain or the heaviness of despair, but it will allow more meanings to color it as well.  And if it can do that, then it is a spirituality for our whole lives.

Audrey deCoursey is a co-pastor with Living Stream Church of the Brethren and an
Open Table Coop board member.