A friend recently recommended Barbara Brown Taylor’s book “Learning to Walk in the Dark.” I finished it in about a day and a half. All I can say is this: More, please. More lunar Christianity (her phrase, not mine).
The cover shows bare trees bathed in moonlight. There is a white owl in one of the branches and a full moon in the right top corner. On the ground, smatterings of what I think are red poppies. It was all I could do to not break into a chorus of “Into the Woods” (“The light is getting dimmer / I think I see a glimmer.”)
One thing Taylor does in her book is to point out many instances in the Bible in which God shows up in the darkness. While thinking I should probably pull a Monica Sharman and do a word study on the words “dark” and “darkness,” I happened upon these verses in the daily lectionary:
from Romeo and Juliet, Scene III, Act II
Come, night, come, Romeo, come, thou day in night;
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow on a raven’s back.
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
William Shakespeare
so beautiful….the words, the images, the lines from this book.
And the passage from the Word–the presence of God was so heavy in the dark the priests couldn’t do their job.
I love the quiet mornings best myself. I wandered out onto the deck in the nearly morning light and glanced up at smudges of clouds overhead, whispering, “Thank you, Jesus.”
Thank you for the nudges, Megan.
Lovely. Just lovely. And peaceful. Thank you for all of this, Megan.
I love this book! And yes, oh yes, why is no one writing a praise song about this?
Oh, oh, oh . . . BBT is one of my all-time favorite, favorite writers. And yes, there should be much more openness to the darkness and God’s presence in it. Yea and amen. Thank you, Megan.