A baby in the womb, Christ in the tomb, a seed in the ground, all come to life where light doesn’t go.
Episcopal priest and North Georgia resident Barbara Brown Taylor explores that blackness in her newest book, “Learning to Walk in the Dark,” a journal of sorts.
Starting with her own childhood fear of the night, she sorts out our culture’s Manichean drive to glorify the sun and denounce the shade, and offers the reassuring wisdom that “when light fades and darkness falls — as it does every single day, in every single life — God does not turn the world over to some other deity.”
It is, perhaps, poetic justice that Taylor’s paean to the dimming of the day has thrown her into the limelight. Time magazine featured Taylor and her book on the cover of its April 28 issue, and in the May 5 issue named the writer among the 100 most influential people in the world.
“I’m happy for the book, but I’m a little overwhelmed at the personal level,” Taylor, 62, says in a recent telephone conversation. “I have been getting a lot of phone calls, and I’m trying to exercise caller ID discretion right now.”
She does her influencing from a little farm outside Clarkesville in Habersham County, where her nearest parishioners are horses, chickens, dogs and the occasional coyote.
After a high-profile stint preaching in Atlanta at All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Taylor and her husband, Ed, traded the city for the country life, and haven’t looked back. Later, Taylor stepped away from the responsibility of directing a congregation and became a teacher of religion at nearby Piedmont College in Demorest.
Once named among the 12 most effective preachers in the English language by Baylor University, Taylor has found a wider audience through her writing. Her books include the 2009 best-seller “An Altar in the World,” in which she described the joy of making a sacrament out of everyday life, and “Leaving Church” from 2006, her goodbye letter to the daily demands of a parish that had become too much for her.
Time magazine describes her work as “spiritual nonfiction that rivals the poetic power of C.S. Lewis and Frederick Buechner.”
Like Buechner, her writing is intimate, sensual and persuasive, as she argues that neither dark nor bad times need be demonized, nor held up as the proof of God’s absence.
“This is not a book about championing darkness as superior to light,” she cautions. “It’s about recovering the whole cycle of season of dark and season of light, in the life of faith and the life of the human spirit.”
Taylor doesn’t pretend that there aren’t dark places where no one should linger. “I’m aware that some people have had more traumatic experience with darkness than I’ve had,” she says, “and it’s important to know where those boundaries are. There are times when something inside says ‘Run!’ Then it’s OK to run.”
But we need not use the light as a Band-Aid for every small injury. And it’s not a bad idea, she says, to sit quietly every now and then as the sun disappears, to let your irises open up, to see the stars come out.
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