One Cold Morning: Into the Darkness...

Into the Darkness, Into the Light…

Yesterday morning I woke up before dawn and prepared for my trek to work. It was yet very early in the morning and, therefore, also very dark outside. As I stepped out of the door, closed it behind me, and stepped out into the cold darkness, I had a striking experience. It took my eyes a little bit longer than normal to adjust from the light of the house to the darkness of the morning. I took three unsteady, blind steps out into the darkness. Suddenly I knew what it was like to have no bearings, no sense of direction or surroundings….
… and then I looked up. Oh, how the celestial dancers that twinkled and winked above lifted my soul! Those bright lights from deep in the unfathomable depths of the universe called to me and drew me out from the confusion. I was awe-struck.

St. Gregory of Nyssa, in The Life of Moses, wrote,
What does it mean that Moses entered the darkness and then saw God in it? […] For leaving behind everything that is observed, not only what sense comprehends but also what the intelligence thinks it sees, it keeps on penetrating deeper until by the intelligence’s yearning for understanding it gains access to the invisible and incomprehensible, and there sees God. This is the true knowledge of what is sought; this is the seeing that consists in not seeing, because that which is sought transcends all knowledge, being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a kind of darkness.

It is often difficult for those of us who deal in the realm of ideas, concepts, and intellectual abstractions to remember that God is infinitely greater than the mind can grasp, that all our intellectual strivings are meant merely to be preparation for approaching the inexpressible Being of God. As St. Gregory well knew, God is so far beyond our mind and senses that we often must be thrown into darkness and uncertainty – we must lose our bearings, leave our familiar signposts behind, and let go of our spiritual safety blankets (whatever they might be) – in order to approach him.

Yes, it is unnerving to have no sense of security; but I would willingly enter that darkness – blind and lost – for the sake of glimpsing the majesty that shone down on my soul that cold morning. So it is also with the unspeakable divine majesty of God. And thus I pray that I might stumble into the blinding darkness that I might find Him whom I seek…