The Dark is Not Evil—A Review of Learning to Walk in the Dark
One summer evening, I was flipping through the pages of this book, curled up in a blanket on my fairly soft couch, not realizing how the sky outside had already darkened. I was pretty much soaked in the wonderful lessons Barbara Brown Taylor brought in her book Learning to Walk in the Dark. It felt right, reading about darkness while the night settled around me.
This book challenges us to stop treating darkness as something to escape, but instead, to enter it fully with trust.
I used to fear the dark. When I walked outside alone, I was sure something would chase me. When I was the only one awake in the house, I felt I had to protect myself. Even closing my eyes, when all the darkness fills into my brain felt dangerous, because I would see what could happen in the dark.
The dark has always been our enemy. But what if the dark isn’t here to scare us, but to teach us? What if it’s not empty, but full of something we’ve been too scared to notice?
With this book, Taylor invites us to rethink our relationship with darkness. She doesn’t just teach us how to walk in it. She first teaches us to sit still with it, to befriend it, and eventually move through it with awareness rather than fear.
“To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight,” Taylor wrote.
We live in a world filled with both light and darkness. God, who created everything around us with intention, created balance. Day and night. Sun and moon. Even in places like the North and South Poles, where polar nights last for weeks, darkness is never forever. The sun still returns, because one cannot exist without the other.
Yet somehow, we tend to favor the light. We thank the day, the brightness of the sun. We’re grateful for electricity and lamps in our homes that keep things visible after dark. We often forget how many people in the world live without that luxury, where they can’t see each other’s faces past 8 p.m.
We also tend to favor the light because we’ve been conditioned to associate darkness with danger.
“Don’t pass that tunnel, it’s dark.”
“Don’t go out, the sky is getting darker.”
As if darkness immediately signals a threat. Our brains switch into alert mode the moment light fades.
It’s true that the darkness hides what we can see and is also full of mystery, but in her book, Taylor challenges that idea. She explores what it truly means to live in the dark, and why we need it.
We tend to think darkness is the absence of worth—when the whole world is doing nothing but rest. But in truth, it is a sacred space.
For me, one of the most memorable parts in this book is when she visited an exhibit in Atlanta called Dialogue in the Dark. There, sighted people are led through a completely dark space by blind guides. Without vision, they’re forced to rely on every other sense. Taylor realized that walking in darkness heightens awareness and sharpens perception. She mentioned that we often pity blind individuals, wondering how they navigate life without sight, but forget how powerful and capable their other senses become because of the dark.
I think it’s also important to remember this: the dark was here before us. Before light was created, Scripture tells us that, “the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep” (Genesis 1:2). God added light not to erase the dark, but to balance it.
“The connection between light and safety may never be fully understood,” Taylor wrote, “since what light can really do and what we imagine it can do are not completely different things.”
We tend to think darkness is the absence of worth—when the whole world is doing nothing but rest. But in truth, it is a sacred space.
Taylor points out how some of the most profound spiritual moments across faiths happen in darkness. Jesus himself rose from the dead in a tomb. That moment of resurrection didn’t happen in daylight or in front of crowds, but in complete silence and darkness.
“…the dark night is God’s best gift for you, intended for your liberation,” Taylor wrote.
In the dark, there is no distraction, nothing to hide behind. We are left with our own thoughts, our own spirit, our own wrestling. The darkness makes space for us to grow; the darkness is where transformation (bodily, spiritually) often begins.
I used to fear the dark, but now I’m learning not just to walk in it, but to dwell in it and be transformed by it.
Barbara Brown Taylor will be featured at the 2026 Festival of Faith & Writing. Learn more here!
