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Learning to Walk in the Dark Paperback – Deckle Edge, March 24, 2015

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 2,247 ratings

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New York Times Bestseller

From the New York Times bestselling author of An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark provides a way to find spirituality in those times when we don’t have all the answers.

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.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Few souls are as synched to the world’s mysteries as Barbara Brown Taylor’s.... Taylor writes spiritual nonfiction that rivals the poetic power of C.S. Lewis and Frederick Buechner.” — TIME

“Taylor challenges our negative associations with darkness and our attraction to light in this thought-provoking new book. She draws on her own experiences―from exploring caves and experimenting with blindness, to her questioning of her own religious training and faith―to explore what might be gained by embracing darkness.” — Spirituality & Health

“An elegant writer with the common touch, Taylor is always a wonderful guide to the spiritual world, and this book is no exception. Here she encourages us to turn out the lights and embrace the spiritual darkness, for it is in the dark, she maintains, that one can truly see.” — Booklist

“Taylor writes with consistent charm and an unobtrusive faith in God; her work is certain to appeal to… fans of Annie Dillard and Anne Lamott.” — Library Journal

“Compellingly makes the case for why darkness is as necessary to our well-being as light. . . . A charming, witty and wise guide into the heart of darkness. . . . There is plenty here to ponder.” — Shelf Awareness

“Reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s writing stuns me, challenges me, and heals me, both with the beauty of her prose and the depth of her wisdom. A gift to every person who’s felt the darkness but not had the words to articulate it… A truly beautiful book.” — Shauna Niequist, author of Bread & Wine

“Eyes wide open, Barbara Brown Taylor has written a precise and evocative field guide to the dark. Exploring the complex and generative terrain of twilight and absence on her own terms, she generously includes us on her journeys, and encourages us to make our own.” — Sharon Salzberg, author of Real Happiness and Lovingkindness

“Beautiful. Profound. Nourishing. I have needed to read this book for a long time.” — Lauren Winner, author of Still and Girl Meets God

“Offers a different way of looking at darkness, not as something to be feared, but as something to be embraced.” — Interfaith Voices, NPR

“Barbara Brown Taylor shows readers that dark times can be great times of learning. The former Episcopalian priest shares her experiences of walking through the dark in her own life. … She takes the reader on a journey to explore and understand the ‘dark’ better.” — CBA Retailers magazine

“Taylor is one of those rare people who truly can see the holy in everything.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Taylor offers no consolation for those who demand the banishment of darkness. But to those willing to enter the darkness and wait in silence, she gives hope.” — The Covenant Companion

From the Back Cover

Follow Barbara Brown Taylor on her journey to understand darkness, which takes her spelunking in unlit caves, learning to eat and cross the street as a blind person, discover-ing how "dark emotions" are prevented from seeing light from a psychiatrist, and reread-ing scripture to see all the times God shows up at night. With her characteristic charm and wisdom, Taylor is our guide through a spirituality of the nighttime, teaching ushow to find God even in darkness, and giving us a way to let darkness teach us what we need to know.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperOne; Reprint edition (March 24, 2015)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062024345
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062024343
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.6 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.47 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 2,247 ratings

About the author

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Barbara Brown Taylor
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Barbara Brown Taylor is a New York Times best-selling author, teacher, and Episcopal priest. Her first memoir, Leaving Church (2006), won an Author of the Year award from the Georgia Writers Association. Her last book, Learning to Walk in the Dark (2014), was featured on the cover of TIME magazine. She has served on the faculties of Piedmont College, Columbia Theological Seminary, Candler School of Theology at Emory University, McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University, and the Certificate in Theological Studies program at Arrendale State Prison for Women in Alto, Georgia. In 2014 TIME included her on its annual list of Most Influential People; in 2015 she was named Georgia Woman of the Year; in 2016 she received The President’s Medal at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees for Mercer University and is working on her fourteenth book, Holy Envy, forthcoming from HarperOne in August 2018.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
2,247 global ratings
The Dark Is Part of Creation Also
5 Stars
The Dark Is Part of Creation Also
Barbara Brown Taylor writes in a clear concise language. Her concepts are couched in personal stories and wiry humor. I highly recommend this book. I won't see dark in the same way again.
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Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2024
Fowler's stages of faith are too age-related and linear, but I loved BbT's description of caving, Dialogue in the Dark, and the questions she raises about the difference between religion, belief, faith, certainty and trust.
Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2014
Bishop John Shelby Spong and the Reverend Barbara Brown Taylor, my two favorite members of the clergy, to me are the yin and yang of all things spiritual. Bishop Spong, with all the fervor of an Old Testament prophet, blasts the Christian fundamentalists with all their craziness in a heartbeat;-- I love him for that--- Barbara Brown Taylor, on the other hand, always leaves me feeling as if she may have almost as many questions about what it is all about as I do. And for that I love her just as much if not more. Now she has written yet another thoughtful and thought-provoking book LEARNING TO WALK IN THE DARK. Her premise is simple: contrary to what we have been taught, darkness is as good and just as important as light and we should explore that darkness on every level. She says her book is not a "how-to" book, that it is essentially her journal and "may be a book about living with loss."

Taylor lets us share her experiences with darkness: a summer night job as a cocktail waitress at Dante's Down the Hatch in Underground Atlanta before and between her school years as a seminary student, a visit to a cave in West Virginia, a trip to Atlanta where she participated in a "Dialogue in the Dark," when she experienced what it was like to be blind, a night spent with only her dog Dancer in a twelve by twelve-foot cabin in the woods with no power where she was not hampered by artificial light, a visit to higher ground to view the last full moonrise of the year. Then there is a chapter entitled "The Dark Night of the Soul," which might just be the best chapter of all. (This "cloudy evening of the soul" that Barbara wrestles with is a little like what the great poet Emily Dickinson, herself no stranger to darkness, might call her "hour of lead.") She also discusses the passages in the Bible that indicate that darkness is good, reminding us that God had Abraham to look up into the night sky and told him that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars, that Jacob's dream occurred at night, not in the day, that in Genesis there was darkness before light. Barbara also quotes theologians and psychologists and provides a bibliography of her research, if that is the right word.

All the above is well and good. But what always brings me back to Barbara is that she is so good with words. She is a poet as much as a preacher. I love her imagery: "half-baked images of God," "peepholes into God," "salt sea of grief." How about this sentence? "I cannot say for sure when my reliable ideas about God began to slip away, but the big chest I used to keep them in is smaller than a shoebox now." And her books and sermons are always sprinkled with quotations from poets, some I know and some I don't. This time she introduced me to Li-Young Lee. (As I read this compelling book , I kept thinking of the line from a Robert Frost poem: "but no, I was out for stars" as well as "the woods are lovely, dark and deep," which would indicate that Mr. Frost may have something positive to say about darkness too.)

Barbara concludes in the Epilogue that learning to walk in the dark has enabled her to take back her faith and that "Among the other treasures of darkness I have dug up along the way are a new collection of Bible stories that all happen after dark, a new set of teachers who know their way around the dark, a deeper reverence for the cloud of unknowing, a greater ability to abide in God's absence, and--by far the most valuable of all--a fresh baptism in the truth that loss is the way of life." She also writes of her own mortality and the limited time she has left. I for one hope she lives longer than Studs Terkel and has many more books in her like this one. Or should she choose just to plant a garden of night-blooming flowers, that would be fine as well.
245 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2019
As I turned on my nightlight at bedtime last night, I thought over all Barbara Brown Taylor had just introduced me to through Learning to Walk in the Dark. How often I've comforted myself by Isaiah 45:3, "I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places" and I've discovered Who is calling me as the voice of God as promised in the second half of that verse. Immediately, I was hooked! I'm a far, far cry from being comfortable inside the depths of a blackened cave, however, and I know this because I've tried spelunking and also the tourist version of The Cave of the Winds when the panic set in. I also was unnerved by the author's intentional or unintentional dark cloud surrounding her references, and Gregory's OF God (being darkness), while I greatly appreciated her many biblical and tangible references to the dark cloud itself surrounding God's glory, as well as the details of His voice and miracles occurring so often in the night. My copy of Learning to Walk in the Dark is strewn with underlines, stars, hearts and comments from the peanut gallery. Who doesn't respect someone who asserts experience and research into biblical mysteries, cyclical mysteries, and purposes for moon cycles and living things that grow in the dark? My admiration for this work is sky-high. I'm especially grateful that my husband also read it this weekend giving us plenty of new things to talk about.
12 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on February 29, 2024
This is a beautiful book about the value of darkness, the treasures hidden in obscurity. If you are a person of faith or not I think there are important lessons about spiritual, physical and emotional darkness and how important it is that are worth considering.
One person found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2014
*****
This is a beautiful exploration of darkness in all of its aspects--something I have seldom read about. Actual physical darkness--as in the night. The dark side of our emotions. Darkness in the Bible and how it is not always presented negatively. It is a fresh look at a somewhat scary topic. The author shares her personal experiences with darkness of all sorts from her past--from working at night as a student, to laying in her yard and being in darkness while looking at the night sky, to having times of depression--and explores how they have helped her to understand the positive and helpful role of darkness.

For me, this book helped me to see darkness differently, not to just immediately feel as though I need to eradicate it by turning on a light. Not to just feel as though I need to run from my difficult emotions.

As I read, I found myself being anxious at times, relaxed at others, very curious all the time, but mostly just glad I got to read another book by this author. I have read her two previous books, enjoyed them, and given them five stars as well; I do think this is my favorite of all of them. I think that this book helped me to "befriend" darkness of all sorts, a great contribution to my life.

This is not a book filled with answers; on the contrary, it raises many questions and stimulates the reader to explore darkness in their own lives. I would say that the reader needs to be open to questioning themselves and to not be looking for black and white answers from the author--although this is a book from a Christian perspective it is not really a Christian book per se and I think that people of any faith orientation except for fundamentalist will enjoy it.

Highly recommended.
*****
130 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on August 27, 2023
I was ready to sink into her lyrical but clear-minded writing, and I've gained from reading earlier books, but this one felt like it had been contracted for, so had to be written but she didn't have enough material to make it book-length.
3 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Paul
5.0 out of 5 stars an incredibly useful book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 19, 2023
Learning to Walk in the Dark is a reclamation of lived realities that we usually seek to avoid. Barbara Brown Taylor journeys with the reader into places we all need to go, but are reluctant to acknowledge.

Darkness is not evil, nor is it particularly good it simply is. Brown Taylor demonstrates that it is our willingness to embrace the darkness that shapes us for good or ill.
Aussie S
5.0 out of 5 stars Allowing the darkness to lead
Reviewed in Australia on April 29, 2018
I was captivated by the disclosure of the moon and the light of the medal of our Lady. Praise God
Helen Reid
5.0 out of 5 stars a worthwhile read
Reviewed in Canada on November 8, 2014
Learning to walk in the dark is a fascinating and personal account of a woman's journey of deepening her faith. It engages the reader with one's own faith journey and questions. I passed my copy on to a friend.
One person found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars A book full of glorious moonlight
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 25, 2019
This is a beautifully descriptive book full of spiritual wisdom and insight. Barbara describes her search for the treasures of darkness through various experiences such as spending time in a wild cave and watching the rising of the full moon. She also gives valuable comments on the current state of the western church and on the dangers of full solar Christianity. A profound and mature journey of a true seeker after truth.
3 people found this helpful
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Joan
5.0 out of 5 stars Barbara is able to questions Christian faith from the depth ...
Reviewed in Canada on March 18, 2016
Barbara is able to questions Christian faith from the depth of her own experience and thereby allows us to the gift of questioning too.
One person found this helpful
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