More Learning to Walk in the Dark Highlights

I finished Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark, which I quoted here. All the other passages I highlighted were from chapter 7, The Dark Night of the Soul…

…when in the centuries following the Enlightenment, secular use of the words “belief” and “believe” began to change until they said less about the disposition of one’s heart than about the furniture in one’s mind. By the nineteenth century, when knowledge about almost anything consisted chiefly of empirical facts, belief became the opposite of knowledge. A person’s belief in God was reduced to his or her belief system—the unprovable statements of faith that person judged to be true.

The great pity of this conflation, Fowler says, is that when faith is reduced to belief in creeds and doctrines, plenty of thoughtful people are going to decide that they no longer have faith. They might hang on if they heard the word used to describe trust or loyalty in something beyond the self…

“If you have understood, then what you have understood is not God,” Saint Augustine said in the fourth century. Sixteen hundred years later, the Northern Irish theologian Peter Rollins¹ says the same thing with equal force…

When I listen to college students talk about faith, beliefs are what interest them most: Do you believe in the virgin birth? Do you believe that Jesus died for your sins? Do you believe that only Christians go to heaven? No one asks, “On what is your heart set?” No one asks, “What powers do you most rely on? What is the hope that gives meaning to your life?” Those are questions of faith, not belief. The answers to them are not written down in any book, and they have a way of shifting in the dark.

All in all, there have never been a lot of people lining up to learn what God is not—especially not now, with so many self-appointed teachers volunteering to reveal the truth about God to anyone who will hold still long enough to listen. The only people I know who are interested in what God is not are those who have run through all the other answers and found them wanting. Waking up in the middle of their own dark nights, they have come quickly to the end of their intellectual resources—and their Sunday school resources too—so there is nothing to do but lie in the dark with something heavy on their chests, listening for a voice in the darkness that does not come…

…the dark night 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 all the benefits you have been promised for believing in God, your devotion to the 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…They all get in God’s way. The late Gerald May, who wrote his own book about John, called them addictions…In many cases, he said, we should give thanks for them, because it is our addiction to some God substitute or another that finally brings us to our knees…

This 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, but since the religion I know best has a lot to say about losing as the precondition for finding, I can live with that. I think I can even 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. Because I do not understand a thing about this, does that mean I understand God? I do not know. All I know is that there is no place I would rather be.