Nothing is Limited By Our Experience

Silence and Darkness Meet Us in Many Ways

A child who was locked in a closet as punishment will not register darkness the same way as a child who looked forward to family camping trips. A child who grew up in an urban housing project will fear things worse than coyotes when she bolts her doors at night. As universal as darkness may be, our experience of it is local. It is also social, cultural, economic, and political, since our relationship with darkness is never limited to what we have personally sensed or intuited about it. — Barbara Brown Taylor

When Cassidy Hall, Kevin Johnson and I started our podcast, “Encountering Silence,” it’s fair to say we each loved silence. Perhaps with slightly different perspectives, although all three of us were drawn to monasticism, contemplation, and introspection. Many episodes later, if I’ve learned anything from the podcast, it’s that silence meets people in different ways, depending on their life experience — including their religious and political identity, their race, sex and gender, their privilege (or lack thereof), and so forth.

For many people, silence is a spiritual balm. But others recounted challenging experiences with what we learned to call ‘toxic silence’ — the silence of not being listened to, of being punished, of being ignored or dismissed. Silence in a prison means something quite different from silence in a cloister.

In Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor makes a similar point about how different people relate to darkness. Does darkness signify danger, or rest? Is it a welcome balance to the dazzling brilliance of light, or a subtle icon of chaos and disruption that threatens us with its mystery and hiddenness?

Mystics historically have loved darkness, like they love silence. “Even the darkness is not dark to you,” prays the Psalmist to God; “the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you” (Psalm 139:12). But Brown Taylor points out that not everyone finds something sacred about the dark. It’s a humbling reminder that no one’s experience of darkness, or silence, or even God is universal: and that we need to balance our faith and trust with a kindness toward those whose story is so different from our own.

Quotation Source: Barbara Brown Taylor. Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night (Kindle Edition), pp. 31-32).