Be Still and Unknow God

The God who is completely beyond us, yet eternally with us

My favorite writer is Victorian novelist and modernist poet Thomas Hardy. I fell in love with his pastoral stories of tragedy and unrequited love in high school, but it’s been only recently that I’ve gained a greater appreciation for his life, beliefs, and struggles with Christianity. Hardy once described losing faith in Christianity like shedding a protective skin: intellectually necessary but also a melancholy process. That hits different these days.

A pilgrimage to Dorset is a must for Hardy fans, and though I’ve been several times, a trip to his native country isn’t complete without calling in on St. Michael’s Church in Stinsford. The village of Stinsford is little more than a cluster of cottages and farm buildings in the English countryside. Hardy's connection with Stinsford is a strong one. He was born a few miles away at Higher Bockhampton, but St Michael's was his parish church into adulthood. He was baptized in the font in the 1840’s and even taught Sunday school before becoming one of England’s great men of letters. The church is unexceptional save two things—Hardy’s grave and Hardy’s window.

Set in the south aisle, the Hardy window was commissioned after the author’s death to depict his favorite biblical story, in which Elijah, robbed in purple, listens for the still small voice of God. Hardy even dedicated one of his poems to the passage we find in I Kings, chapter 19.

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.

Though Hardy outgrew his Anglican childhood and became an agnostic later in life, he always held on to a hope that God might exist even though everything in this life proved otherwise. A product of Darwinian fatalism, Hardy was too much of a realist to believe a good God superintended the goings on here on this broken planet. Like Hardy, I vacillate between belief and unbelief, but I’m beginning to realize my skepticism has more to do with what I was taught about God, than God Herself. Which is why his window, and the theology behind it, is so meaningful to me.

Like so much in our Bible, the English translation of this particular encounter is an anemic rendition of the original text. The writer is giving us a glimpse into the very heart and personality of God. Your Creator isn’t known in extravagance, storms, earthquakes, or fires. She is experienced and felt in a gentle whisper. 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, silence, and ambiguity. 

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 domesticated deity known primarily through the intellect. Which is probably why Hardy became an agnostic.

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. Seen yet unseen, felt but never touched.

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 I mean. 

Like Hardy, I have my doubts about God and the church. But here’s what I am learning that I wish he knew. 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.

The next time you want to know God, instead of grabbing a theology book or listening to an intellectually stimulating podcast like Holy Heretics, 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. As Meister Eckhart revealed to us, “Nothing in all Creation is so like God as silence.”

So, be still and know God. Be still and unknow all you’ve been told of God. Be still. Just be.

Gary Alan Taylor