The thick darkness

When the LORD came down on Sinai in fire and cloud and the mountain shook, the people kept their distance, terrified. And then comes a line that should stop us: the people stayed at a distance, and Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was. Not toward the light — toward the darkness, and God was in it. Solomon said the same centuries later, dedicating the temple: the LORD has said He would dwell in the thick darkness. We are slow to believe this, because we file darkness under absence and light under presence, and assume that when our clear ideas of God fail, God Himself has failed us. But there is a disorientation in which God is not absent at all; He has simply outgrown the tidy concepts we kept Him in. He is too vast, too holy, too other for our neat definitions, and their failure is not His departure but the first honest sight of His size. An old and anonymous tradition spoke of a cloud of unknowing between the soul and God — a darkness you do not light up with cleverer ideas but enter with love. The dark where you can no longer map Him may be the very place He is.

There is a kind of unknowing that is loss, and a kind that is the beginning of wisdom, and the wilderness can produce either. The first gives up — decides that because the old certainties cracked, there is nothing there. The second draws nearer — suspects that the cracking of the certainties is God refusing to stay small, and steps toward the darkness rather than back from it. The apophatic tradition, the way of unknowing, was never an excuse for vagueness or a license to believe nothing. It was the hard-won humility of people who had met God and found Him larger than their language, who learned that the truest thing they could say of Him was finally how much He exceeded their saying. To draw near the thick darkness is not to abandon what Scripture reveals; it is to hold even revealed truth with open hands, knowing the One it points to is greater than the pointing. The collapse of your small clear box is frightening. But it may be the door, not the wall. God dwells in thick darkness, and Moses went in.