I have been given the gift of lunar
spirituality, in which the divine light available to me waxes and wanes
with the season.
--Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark
And Not Only That
The problem is that there are so few people who can teach me about that. Most of the books on the New York Times “How-To” bestseller list are about how to avoid various kinds of darkness. If you want to learn how to be happy and stay that way, how to win out over your adversaries at work, or how to avoid aging by eating the right foods, there is a book for you. If you are not a reader, you can always find someone on the radio, the television, or the web who will tell you about the latest strategy for staying out of your dark places, or at least distract you from them for a while. Most of us own so many electronic gadgets that there is always a light box within reach when any kind of darkness begins to descend on us. Why watch the sun go down when you could watch the news instead? Why lie awake at night when a couple of rounds of Moonlight Mahjong could put you back to sleep? I wish I could turn to the church for help, but so many congregations are preoccupied with keeping the lights on right now that the last thing they want to talk about is how to befriend the dark. Plus, Christianity has never had anything nice to say about darkness. From earliest times, Christians have used “darkness” as a synonym for sin, ignorance, spiritual blindness, and death. Visit almost any church and you can still hear it used that way today: Deliver us, O Lord, from the powers of darkness. Shine into our hearts the brightness of your Holy Spirit, and protect us from all perils and dangers of the night.
Solar Spirituality
Since I live on a farm where the lights can go out for days at a time, this language works at a practical level. When it is twenty degrees outside at midnight and tree branches heavy with ice are crashing to the ground around your house, it makes all kinds of sense to pray for protection from the dangers of the night. When coyotes show up in the yard after dark, eyeing your crippled old retriever as potential fast food, the perils of the night are more than theoretical. So I can understand how people who lived before the advent of electricity — who sometimes spent fourteen hours in the dark without the benefit of so much as a flashlight — might have become sensitive to the powers of darkness, asking God for deliverance in the form of bright morning light. At the theological level, however, this language creates all sorts of problems. 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 and leaving you to deal with the rest on your own time. It implies things about dark-skinned people and sight-impaired people that are not true. Worst of all, it offers people of faith a giant closet in which they can store everything that threatens or frightens them without thinking too much about those things. It rewards them for their unconsciousness, offering spiritual justification for turning away from those things, for “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). To embrace that teaching and others like it at face value can result in a kind of spirituality that deals with darkness by denying its existence or at least depriving it of any meaningful attention. I call it “full solar spirituality,” since it focuses on staying in the light of God around the clock, both absorbing and reflecting the sunny side of faith. You can usually recognize a full solar church by its emphasis on the benefits of faith, which include a sure sense of God’s presence, certainty of belief, divine guidance in all things, and reliable answers to prayer. Members strive to be positive in attitude, firm in conviction, helpful in relationship, and unwavering in faith. This sounds like heaven on earth. Who would not like to dwell in God’s light 24/7?
Lunar Spirituality
If you have ever belonged to such a community, however, you may have discovered that the trouble starts when darkness falls on your life, which can happen in any number of unsurprising ways: you lose your job, your marriage falls apart, your child acts out in some attention-getting way, you pray hard for something that does not happen, you begin to doubt some of the things you have been taught about what the Bible says. The first time you speak of these things in a full solar church, you can usually get a hearing. Continue to speak of them and you may be reminded that God will not let you be tested beyond your strength. All that is required of you is to have faith. If you still do not get the message, sooner or later it will be made explicit for you: the darkness is your own fault, because you do not have enough faith. Having been on the receiving end of this verdict more than once, I do not think it is as mean as it sounds. The people who said it seemed genuinely to care about me. They had honestly offered me the best they had. Since their sunny spirituality had not given them many skills for operating in the dark, I had simply exhausted their resources. They could not enter the dark without putting their own faith at risk, so they did the best they could. They stood where I could still hear them and begged me to come back into the light. If I could have, I would have. There are days when I would give anything to share their vision of the world and their ability to navigate it safely, but my spiritual gifts do not seem to include the gift of solar spirituality. Instead, I have been given the gift of lunar spirituality, in which the divine light available to me waxes and wanes with the season. When I go out on my porch at night, the moon never looks the same way twice. Some nights it is as round and bright as a headlight; other nights it is thinner than the sickle hanging in my garage. Some nights it is high in the sky, and other nights low over the mountains. Some nights it is altogether gone, leaving a vast web of stars that are brighter in its absence. All in all, the moon is a truer mirror for my soul than the sun that looks the same way every day.
--Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark
I lived in New Mexico for about ten years and put on a summer workshop called Writing a Spiritual Autobiography at the Benedictine monastery in Pecos just outside Santa Fe (pecosmonastery.org). I did this with my husband, a resigned Roman Catholic priest who is now a writer (payattentiontraveler.blogspot.com) and author (The Gift by Louis Michalski at Amazon). The rustic old monastery, originally a dude ranch in the 1930s, is set on
the Pecos River just a stone's throw from the property that was film star Val Kilmer's Pecos River Ranch and is not too far from
Jane Fonda's Forked Lightning Ranch (which used to belong to screen
legend Greer Garson). The bucolic setting invites the letting down of defenses and bravado, somewhere a seeker can feel safe and validated by the accepting and
supportive company of other wayfarers. True, there was the fluttering presence of a few well meaning, pursed-lipped resident priests trying their best to shush our group's sometimes
raucous laughter and jollity as we all went about happily in search of our souls. But we didn't mind, we just wished them well and went on our way to gather at the river.
Writing Makes Meaning
When we first began offering this workshop it seemed quite avant-garde, an opportunity for seekers to feel affirmed and listened to as they flung open the doors to perception and lay bare the heretofore shrouded and half articulated soul stirrings that brought them to such a workshop in the first place. The people who showed up were smack in the middle of a major plot twist in life-- career changers, people with health challenges, those with relationship issues -- in other words, soul searchers (including ourselves) who were well on their way way to wisdom's edge. Over a three day period participants were asked to write about what the term spiritual journey meant for them and a fair number of them reported some rather profound awakenings about the evolution of their thinking. One man, a sociology professor, clinched his long simmering desire to ditch his current career and enter the seminary. Another participant, a young human resources professional from back east, said the whole thing had been life changing for her and that she'd found the courage to start her own life coaching business with a strong emphasis on the spiritual dimensions of redefining work. A woman in training to become a Unity minister called the experience a time and place where she dared give voice to feelings and thoughts she wasn't comfortable sharing with her ministerial colleagues at home. Writing a spiritual memoir has become quite popular over the years with such offerings as Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love achieving runaway best seller status and was later made into a movie. I'm sure you can name similar offerings that have been equally entertaining and enlightening. With the resurgence of the genre, author and Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor in 2006 wrote Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (barbarabrowntaylor.com) and has recently released an admirable new addition to the genre of spiritual autobiography, Learning to Walk in the Dark (HarperOne). It speaks to my intuitive and artistic sensibilities about the necessity of embracing both light and shadow for a life of balance and truth, plus I'm intrigued with the awakening and discovery story of how an over-60 female, trained in mainstream, patriarchal religious orthodoxy, evolved in her thinking and feeling about her own spirituality. Seems to me it takes real inner courage to look squarely at the delicate matters surrounding a professional life dedicated to spirituality and then admit you might have gotten it wrong and so had to start all over. How she came to embrace an approach to spirituality that women across cultures and time have known about instinctively and lived by for thousands of years promises to be an exceptional read. Here's an excerpt reposted from TIME e-magazine.
Writing Makes Meaning
When we first began offering this workshop it seemed quite avant-garde, an opportunity for seekers to feel affirmed and listened to as they flung open the doors to perception and lay bare the heretofore shrouded and half articulated soul stirrings that brought them to such a workshop in the first place. The people who showed up were smack in the middle of a major plot twist in life-- career changers, people with health challenges, those with relationship issues -- in other words, soul searchers (including ourselves) who were well on their way way to wisdom's edge. Over a three day period participants were asked to write about what the term spiritual journey meant for them and a fair number of them reported some rather profound awakenings about the evolution of their thinking. One man, a sociology professor, clinched his long simmering desire to ditch his current career and enter the seminary. Another participant, a young human resources professional from back east, said the whole thing had been life changing for her and that she'd found the courage to start her own life coaching business with a strong emphasis on the spiritual dimensions of redefining work. A woman in training to become a Unity minister called the experience a time and place where she dared give voice to feelings and thoughts she wasn't comfortable sharing with her ministerial colleagues at home. Writing a spiritual memoir has become quite popular over the years with such offerings as Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love achieving runaway best seller status and was later made into a movie. I'm sure you can name similar offerings that have been equally entertaining and enlightening. With the resurgence of the genre, author and Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor in 2006 wrote Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (barbarabrowntaylor.com) and has recently released an admirable new addition to the genre of spiritual autobiography, Learning to Walk in the Dark (HarperOne). It speaks to my intuitive and artistic sensibilities about the necessity of embracing both light and shadow for a life of balance and truth, plus I'm intrigued with the awakening and discovery story of how an over-60 female, trained in mainstream, patriarchal religious orthodoxy, evolved in her thinking and feeling about her own spirituality. Seems to me it takes real inner courage to look squarely at the delicate matters surrounding a professional life dedicated to spirituality and then admit you might have gotten it wrong and so had to start all over. How she came to embrace an approach to spirituality that women across cultures and time have known about instinctively and lived by for thousands of years promises to be an exceptional read. Here's an excerpt reposted from TIME e-magazine.
The Problem Is This
Christianity has never had anything nice to say abut the dark. Darkness”
is shorthand for anything that scares me — that I want no part of —
either because I am sure that I do not have the resources to survive it
or because I do not want to find out. The absence of God is in there,
along with the fear of dementia and the loss of those nearest and
dearest to me. So is the melting of polar ice caps, the suffering of
children, and the nagging question of what it will feel like to die. If I
had my way, I would eliminate everything from chronic back pain to the
fear of the devil from my life and the lives of those I love — if I
could just find the right night-lights to leave on. At
least I think I would. The problem is this: when, despite all my best
efforts, the lights have gone off in my life (literally or figuratively,
take your pick), plunging me into the kind of darkness that turns my
knees to water, nonetheless I have not died. The monsters have not
dragged me out of bed and taken me back to their lair. The witches have
not turned me into a bat. Instead, I have learned things in the dark
that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my
life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical
conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.And Not Only That
The problem is that there are so few people who can teach me about that. Most of the books on the New York Times “How-To” bestseller list are about how to avoid various kinds of darkness. If you want to learn how to be happy and stay that way, how to win out over your adversaries at work, or how to avoid aging by eating the right foods, there is a book for you. If you are not a reader, you can always find someone on the radio, the television, or the web who will tell you about the latest strategy for staying out of your dark places, or at least distract you from them for a while. Most of us own so many electronic gadgets that there is always a light box within reach when any kind of darkness begins to descend on us. Why watch the sun go down when you could watch the news instead? Why lie awake at night when a couple of rounds of Moonlight Mahjong could put you back to sleep? I wish I could turn to the church for help, but so many congregations are preoccupied with keeping the lights on right now that the last thing they want to talk about is how to befriend the dark. Plus, Christianity has never had anything nice to say about darkness. From earliest times, Christians have used “darkness” as a synonym for sin, ignorance, spiritual blindness, and death. Visit almost any church and you can still hear it used that way today: Deliver us, O Lord, from the powers of darkness. Shine into our hearts the brightness of your Holy Spirit, and protect us from all perils and dangers of the night.
Solar Spirituality
Since I live on a farm where the lights can go out for days at a time, this language works at a practical level. When it is twenty degrees outside at midnight and tree branches heavy with ice are crashing to the ground around your house, it makes all kinds of sense to pray for protection from the dangers of the night. When coyotes show up in the yard after dark, eyeing your crippled old retriever as potential fast food, the perils of the night are more than theoretical. So I can understand how people who lived before the advent of electricity — who sometimes spent fourteen hours in the dark without the benefit of so much as a flashlight — might have become sensitive to the powers of darkness, asking God for deliverance in the form of bright morning light. At the theological level, however, this language creates all sorts of problems. 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 and leaving you to deal with the rest on your own time. It implies things about dark-skinned people and sight-impaired people that are not true. Worst of all, it offers people of faith a giant closet in which they can store everything that threatens or frightens them without thinking too much about those things. It rewards them for their unconsciousness, offering spiritual justification for turning away from those things, for “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). To embrace that teaching and others like it at face value can result in a kind of spirituality that deals with darkness by denying its existence or at least depriving it of any meaningful attention. I call it “full solar spirituality,” since it focuses on staying in the light of God around the clock, both absorbing and reflecting the sunny side of faith. You can usually recognize a full solar church by its emphasis on the benefits of faith, which include a sure sense of God’s presence, certainty of belief, divine guidance in all things, and reliable answers to prayer. Members strive to be positive in attitude, firm in conviction, helpful in relationship, and unwavering in faith. This sounds like heaven on earth. Who would not like to dwell in God’s light 24/7?
Lunar Spirituality
If you have ever belonged to such a community, however, you may have discovered that the trouble starts when darkness falls on your life, which can happen in any number of unsurprising ways: you lose your job, your marriage falls apart, your child acts out in some attention-getting way, you pray hard for something that does not happen, you begin to doubt some of the things you have been taught about what the Bible says. The first time you speak of these things in a full solar church, you can usually get a hearing. Continue to speak of them and you may be reminded that God will not let you be tested beyond your strength. All that is required of you is to have faith. If you still do not get the message, sooner or later it will be made explicit for you: the darkness is your own fault, because you do not have enough faith. Having been on the receiving end of this verdict more than once, I do not think it is as mean as it sounds. The people who said it seemed genuinely to care about me. They had honestly offered me the best they had. Since their sunny spirituality had not given them many skills for operating in the dark, I had simply exhausted their resources. They could not enter the dark without putting their own faith at risk, so they did the best they could. They stood where I could still hear them and begged me to come back into the light. If I could have, I would have. There are days when I would give anything to share their vision of the world and their ability to navigate it safely, but my spiritual gifts do not seem to include the gift of solar spirituality. Instead, I have been given the gift of lunar spirituality, in which the divine light available to me waxes and wanes with the season. When I go out on my porch at night, the moon never looks the same way twice. Some nights it is as round and bright as a headlight; other nights it is thinner than the sickle hanging in my garage. Some nights it is high in the sky, and other nights low over the mountains. Some nights it is altogether gone, leaving a vast web of stars that are brighter in its absence. All in all, the moon is a truer mirror for my soul than the sun that looks the same way every day.
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