Learning to Walk in the Dark
book study group closing
October 5th 2015

June Martin

"Come inside now, it's getting dark"; "At best I can remember, my parents did not teach me to fear the dark"; "My father would take my sisters and me out into the backyard, where we would lie on our backs, without talking and watch for falling stars";" Our parents took us camping a lot". These quotes from Barbara Brown Taylor' book got me thinking about my early memories and as I shared in a discussion group two weeks ago I cannot remember ever being afraid of the dark and I wonder if it is because I grew up in London during the war when we had total blackouts, no streetlights of course and not a chink of light to be seen from a window.

Wardens patrolled the streets making sure. Of course we could not do anything about the moon which sometimes gave us too much light. I spent many a night going outside to our underground damp dark shelter at the bottom of the garden, whilst people from apartments headed to their nearest underground railway station. Barbara Brown Taylor talks too about feeling afraid inside the house of monsters under the bed and the like. I am not an imaginative person and I have never had any time for any of that; never participated in the telling of ghost stories or read those types of books or went to those films. I still think it strange that one of the questions I was asked when I went for an interview to be admitted to a prestigious school was "Do you believe in fairies?" Of course I said most emphatically "Of course not". The headmistress said, "Now don't you be so sure." I got into the school anyway!

Getting further into the book, Barbara Brown Taylor is writing about other kinds of darkness besides the physical one and I think you will agree that September 11th 2001 is one such darkness. This leads me to remember what I was doing on that morning and for the days following. I was a Girl Guide Trainer for leaders in this Province and I was in charge of Stage 3, or Wild Rose training. This was, and is, a Human Relations residential training at a camp site.

The one is question was on September 13th -- 16th 2001 at Gull Lake Baptist Church Camp. On September 11th I had an idea to buy a memento for the participants and I phoned a friend to ask where I get this particular item. She was horrified by the triviality of it and said "Don't you know that America is being attacked?" I decided a week ago to look up m evaluation of that camp and to read parts of it to you, hoping that you might be interested.

"This was a very different Wild Rose from others I have been privileged to train or coordinate.
Who would have thought that the tentacles from the tragedy affecting America on September 11th would reach out to our small Wild Rose event at Gull Lake. Several of the participants were from the military base at Cold Lake, two actually in the military and others with husbands in the military. On September 12th ! received a phone call warning the team that it was unlikely that these ladies would be able to make the training because the base was on high alert.

Fortunately the next day all but one arrived and the training went ahead. Thursday evening went well with everyone trying hard to put the events of September 11th behind them. Friday was declared a day of prayer so our reflections in the morning were lengthy, somber and emotional with a two minutes silence observed. After this I told everyone to go for a walk and to reconvene in 15 minutes for the team building session. I definitely needed to compose myself before the light hearted exercises began. Later in the day the outside world intruded upon us again when the RCMP arrived to tell some of the participants that their husbands had been ordered to scramble the planes and had gone to secret destinations. These Guiders were visibly upset and the other participants rallied around them. It was hard for the teams to keep their minds on the topics at hand. Saturday stated with another emotional reflections and finished with a lovely candlelight walk. So the evaluation goes on but getting back to physical darkness I want to explain our candlelight walks because when I was organizing they were a wonderful part of every Wild Rose Training.

Early in the day the training team maps out an area of forest trails with a clearing at the end.
Later sand is placed in paper bags and a candle lit in each bag. These are placed alongside the trail at every corner and then a ring of them in the clearing. After dark participants are sent out in single file with a space between each to walk the trail in total silence. Each person carries a flashlight to put onto their feet if the trail gets rough. Usually one's eyes adjust quickly to the dark. They also need a flashlight to take turns reciting a poem, a prayer or a reading, sometimes stopping at one of the candles, or at the end, in the clearing.