I wonder sometimes if those who have the most to worry about with the commandment to not take the Lord’s name in vain are not those who swear and curse all the time, but rather those of us who are so publicly pious and dare I say preachy that we’re always jawing on about “God.” “God” this and “God” that – some of us seem to have a lot we think we know and can say about “God,” God help me. If you too seemed inclined to use “The ‘G’ word” in a quick and easy way, I invite you to join me in tapping the breaks, and to check in, honestly, about what we really mean when we use that word, and why.

It doesn’t matter which word you use, and we’ve got a lot of them: whether it’s a traditional “God” or “the Lord” or something more expansive like “the Divine” or “the Holy One,” “the Sacred,” “Eternal Spirit;” it doesn’t matter which language or which tradition your words come from: “Allah,” or “Bahá,” or “Adonai,” “El Shaddai,” “HaShem,” or “Brahmen,” or “Dao,” or “Ahura Mazda,” “Kishelëmúkónk,” “Wakan Tanka,” “Wokumosoro,” “Ruwa”… I could go on and on … The reality is, that the Reality of whatever it is we at our best try to mean with our puny words, the actual Reality to which any of these words at best gesture, that Reality is beyond, far beyond the scope of our comprehension and imagination.

That’s when we use these words at our best. Too often we use pious words to mean something quite a bit less than “God”, something all-too-human, something that serves our all-to0-human cravings and needs.

So, it is good to take a step back from all our “God-talk,” and find ways to let a bit of mystery and wonder and awesome power and beauty just wash over us, and ease our minds and hearts open.

Now, all that said, the truth is, we can only approach the Reality of the Divine through symbols and images and felt impressions. What else have we got? Whatever access we have to Holy Transcendence is through pinholes or shadows playing on walls, we can at best see through thick lenses that we, after all, need to protect our eyes from frying from a direct look at Divine Radiance. Even the Seraphim are said to cover their eyes as they orbit the center of the Godhead, singing “Holy, Holy, Holy.”

It is by the grace of God that we can at times sit back with our eyes closed and bask in the warmth and the glow of Divinity.

Whatever it is we can know about “The ‘G’ word” it is mediated through that-which-is-other-than-God. But the amazing thing is that we can learn to discover that the Divine is in fact present in that which is other than God, even in what we feel to be God’s absence. God is so beyond our usual ways of conceptualizing the world, that God is not contained by a tidy division between “God” and “not-God.”

In other words, people can often say that God is like light, and not-God is like the opposite of light, darkness – but eclipses of the light can also lead to revelations of it. Let’s not be quick to take this in a simplistic and judgmental way, where “Light = Good; Dark = Bad; so shun and shame the darkness, O you who wish to show your righteousness.” Rather, light and shadow are mutually dependent pairs. Experiences we have with the shadows can be formative and fruitful, and can help clarify how we receive and reflect the light. Experiences we call dark can also be horrible and destructive, of course – but so can staring directly at the sun, or a moth flying into a flame.

This past week, an Eastern Orthodox thinker I really enjoy, David Bentley Hart, wrote this about his experience of the total solar eclipse:

“The birds all at once fell silent, with the exception of one rebel cardinal somewhere among the pear-blossoms; the sky was a soft glassy blue through which a scattering of stars could be seen; the air had acquired a slight but distinct chill…. I felt a peculiar serenity come over me, and even a kind of elation—I think because, for those few minutes, I felt as if I had slipped over into some other, more mysteriously beautiful, somehow timeless world … The sight of the sun swallowed up in the absolute, impenetrable darkness of the moon’s silhouette brought to my mind the final lines of the first chapter of the Daodejing, which speak of the one source of all things as an abyss of mystery that is also a gateway into the essence of things.” https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/dao-and-eclipse

An “abyss of mystery” can be a “gateway” into “the essence of things” – darkness can lead to a revelation of the light (and the shadows) at the hearts of things. But an abyss of mystery can also be scary.

“Eclipse” in Greek means abandonment. Before people understood that the natural cause of eclipses guaranteed it would be brief, some people felt it could be the sun abandoning the world, or getting swallowed up for good by some monstrous being. This too can lead to revelation.

Simone Weil, the great Jewish-Christian thinker and mystic and humanitarian (who died in Nazi occupied France), wrote: “One who does not have God in them cannot feel God’s absence.”  Contemplate that for a while: “One who does not have God in them cannot feel God’s absence.” What does this mean about our feelings of God’s absence?

Do you know what that feels like, to feel God’s absence? Or to yearn for a God who feels very far away? Sometimes this is because of how we have turned away from God, or how someone else has, in a way that makes life hard for those around them. But other times feeling bereft of God’s presence just seems to happen. The wisdom of our tradition says to not turn away from a felt sense of absence, but to feel the yearning that comes from it.

That felt absence, that yearning is itself, you could say, shadow traces of Divine Reality. A “God-shaped hole” some people call it. It is part of the shifting kaleidoscope of light and shadow and color that plays through this world full of things that are other-than-God and all yet held in God’s orbit, and given life through the illumination and warmth of God’s power.

This is not at all to dismiss the distress that can come when we feel God’s absence – but in fact to dignify it, for what it indicates about the nature of God’s presence.

Eclipse experiences are central to the stories and testimonies of our faith.

During Holy Week a few weeks ago, we remembered how Jesus himself felt God’s absence: 

 “At midday, a darkness came over the whole country, lasting until three in the afternoon. And, at three, Jesus called out loudly, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani?” which means ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’- Mark 15:33-24

His words echo the ancient Psalms his people have held sacred for countless generations, Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

A cry abandonment, of eclipse.

Yet even in the peak of the darkness, the depth of the abyss, the corona flares.

Then at Easter the stone of the tomb rolls away, like the shadow of the moon moving past the sun to reveal its light reborn once more.

Simone Weil also wrote that, “God continually showers the fullness of God’s grace on every being in the universe. But we consent to a greater or lesser degree.”

And there is the story about Jesus, from the Gospel of Thomas:

His followers said to Jesus, “When will the Realm come?”
Jesus said, “It will not come by looking for it. It will not be a matter of saying, ‘Here it is!’ Or ‘Look! There it is.’ Rather the Realm of the Father is spread out upon the earth, but people don’t see it.” – Gospel of Thomas 113

Sometimes we do glimpse this, perhaps through a glass darkly, perhaps through the ways it is reflected through the colors of this world.

Everything we experience as humans is a play of shadow and light, of presence and absence, of revelation and forgetfulness. And that’s okay. It couldn’t be any other way. It’s just yet another way for us to appreciate the gift of Mercy.

            Thanks be to God.

Delivered Sunday, April 14, 2024, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.