What the Chinese Finger Trap Teaches Us About Spiritual Darkness
- 7 days ago
- 4 min read
A reflection on Barbara Brown Taylor's Learning to Walk in the Dark and the mystics who came before her
I’ve always been fascinated by magic shops. Illusions, pranks, wonders. As a kid, I’d count my pocket change and see what mysteries of the universe I could acquire to likewise confound friends and family. One of the cheaper delights—Chinese finger traps.
You probably know the toy. It's a small woven tube, usually made of bamboo. You place a finger from each hand inside, and then, almost immediately, you do the one thing guaranteed to make the situation worse: you pull.
The harder you pull, the tighter the trap becomes.
We are convinced that the solution is force. Pull harder to find freedom.
The secret, of course, is exactly the opposite. You have to buck instinct, relax, and move your fingers toward one another. You have to stop fighting the trap long enough to discover a different way out of it.
Most of us treat uncertainty like a Chinese finger trap. We pull.
We rush toward solutions. We scramble for answers or escapes. We try to outrun grief, confusion, doubt, sadness, conflict, or fear. We want brighter lights and clearer maps.
We demand clarity when we find our road has been plunged into darkness.
Yet some of the most important seasons of life refuse to be illuminated.
Barbara Brown Taylor explores precisely this in her beautiful book Learning to Walk in the Dark, which she will be teaching about live this Saturday, July 11.
Taylor challenges one of the oldest assumptions in our spiritual imagination: that light is good and darkness is bad. We associate God or the healing path with brightness, certainty, revelation, and clarity. Darkness represents danger, confusion, and absence.
Yet Taylor writes:
"I have learned things in the dark that I could have never learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again... I need darkness as much as I need light."
If everything is going well, that may sound poetic. If you are suffering loss of a close relationship, bearing physical pain, or at your wits’ end, it may sound impossible or downright rude.
Yet many have discovered what Taylor is pointing toward. There are things that can only be learned in the dark. Patience, humility, compassion, trust. The ability to take the next step without seeing the entire staircase.
Barbara Brown Taylor is hardly the first to say so. The mystics have been saying it for centuries. John of the Cross called it the dark night. Thomas Merton found God beyond certainty. They are all pointing toward the same mystery: there are things that can only be learned in the dark.
The Scriptures seem to know this too.
Psalm 23 contains one of the most beloved passages in the Bible: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for you are with me.”
What strikes me now as I revisit it is that the promise is NOT that the valley disappears or gets bathed in sunlight. The shepherd does not offer a shortcut around it or an escalator to a higher plane. The psalm assumes there will be valleys. There will be shadows. There will be seasons when we cannot see the steps ahead. The promise is presence.
Not certainty. Presence.
Not answers. Presence.
Not escape. Presence.
"You are with me."
Perhaps that is why so many spiritual traditions speak of darkness not as punishment but as teacher. The Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön writes, "Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing."
The dark has a way of exposing the limits of even our best strategies. How much energy do we spend trying to control what ultimately cannot be controlled? Oh how we squirm and reach for explanations, sitting in our uncomfortable state of not-knowing.
Yet there is another possibility. Instead of pulling harder, we can become curious. We can listen. We can engage the darkness relationally as opposed to confrontationally.
No, this doesn't mean romanticizing suffering or pretending pain is pleasant. It simply means recognizing that not every dark season is a mistake or a punishment.
Some darkness is fertile. Seeds begin in darkness. Each new life emerges from darkness. As Taylor reminds us, even resurrection begins in darkness.
"Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb," she writes, "new life starts in the dark."
Paradox sits at the heart of nearly every spiritual tradition. The very things we spend our lives trying to avoid often become the places where grace quietly waits for us.
As an acclaimed Episcopal priest, professor, and one of today's most beloved spiritual writers, Barbara Brown Taylor has spent decades helping people discover that faith is often formed not in certainty, but in mystery, doubt, and loss. This Saturday, July 11, she'll show us what that looks like in practice.
Together we'll explore how darkness is not merely something to survive, but a sacred place where God often does God's deepest work.
Because sometimes the next faithful step is not pulling away from the darkness. It is leaning in toward it.
David Drury holds a master's degree in Interdisciplinary Christian Studies from Regent College, University of British Columbia. He is a “notorious” blackjack professional, keynote speaker, and the son of a Baptist preacher. He made a rock-and-roll road trip movie in Tokyo, Japan. His essays have been published at CNN, National Catholic Reporter and Jesuit Media Lab. His mystical-literary fiction has been published in Best American Nonrequired Reading and elsewhere. Learn more at daviddruryauthor.com/author.
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