Be Still and Unknow God

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In a 13th-century church in the small village of Stinsford in southwest England resides the Hardy Memorial Window, a stained-glass work of art that depicts the prophet Elijah’s direct encounter with God at Mount Horeb (named for Thomas Hardy, since this was his favorite story from the Bible). We read in 1 Kings 19 that as Elijah was running for his life from Queen Jezebel, he is commanded to take a pilgrimage to the mountain of God in order to meet God there:

The Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.”

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

Like so much in our Bible, the English translation of this particular encounter is an anemic rendition of the original text. Translated as “still small voice” or “a gentle whisper,” the original Hebrew words used to describe what Elijah heard is Bat Kol, literally translated “the daughter of a sound.” This sound of sheerest silence is about as close as human words can get to describing divine speech, much less a divine encounter of the closest of kinds. 

In a way, the story reveals who God is by revealing who God is not, hinting at what came to be known in ancient Christianity as “apophatic knowing,” or a humble, experiential approach to divinity cloaked in mystery, wonder, and ambiguity. 

“God is known in unknowing—through silence and symbols that exist beyond words.”

Unfortunately we’ve all but lost this form of ancient spirituality, leaning heavily on “kataphatic” or intellectual knowledge because it’s far more accessible to our minds and our ego. And since most of us feel safer in certitude than mystery, we’ve come to believe in a deity domesticated by our rationalistic minds. Sadly this over-reliance on the intellect often only leads to a fundamentalist “I’m right, you’re wrong” mentality and rarely to lasting transformation. You can think all the right things and still not know God. 

But in apophatic tradition, God is known in unknowing—through silence and symbols that exist beyond words. God is found in the dark night of the soul when, in open-hearted surrender, we finally admit that we really don’t know. “Then alone do we know God truly, when we believe that God is far beyond all that we can possibly think of God,” wrote Thomas Aquinas. This almost negative description of divinity captures the mystery and veiled disclosure of a God beyond our grasp and even beyond our words. 

The Hebrew people understand this well. Ancient Israelites were so in awe of the mystery of their God that any attempts to name the divine was met with extreme hesitation. To name God was to tame God. In Hebrew, the sacred name for God is YHWH (yod, he, vay, and he), yet the word itself isn’t so much spoken with the lips as it is breathed with the entire body, since it contains the only three Hebrew consonants that do not allow closing the mouth while saying the word. Say YHWH out loud now to know what we mean. 

By now, the message should be clear: God is completely beyond us, yet eternally with us. God exists on the border streams of language yet as near as the air we breathe. Without knowing, we’ve been inhaling and exhaling God since we were born, sustained by God’s name since we drew our first breaths. 

This God, who is more often than not cloaked in the darkness and mystery of sheer silence, revealed only in the “daughter of a sound,” is ineffable yet eternally available. So the next time you want to know God, instead of grabbing a theology book or listening to an intellectually stimulating podcast, sit in sheer silence. Still your soul and allow “the darkness of God” to come upon you. Breathe in God’s mysterious goodness by practicing a form of apophatic knowing as you sit in the empty space around words, allowing God to fill in the gaps in unspeakable ways.

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