The absence of God

God himself, as God, does not appear in the world or in
human experience.  He is not the kind of being that can be present as a
thing in the world.  And yet, despite this necessary absence,
he is believed to be that which gives the definitive sense to
everything that does appear in the world and in experience.  We first
learn about the Christian God in the course of Christian living.  We
hear about him through preaching, we address him in prayer, and we
attempt to respond to him in our actions; however, we approach him as one who will always be absent to us while we remain in something we now must call “our present state.”

Robert Sokolowski

Last February I preached on a text from Isaiah, using this quote
about the necessary absence of God.  The sermon made a distinction
between what is immediately present and what is indirectly present. 
The creation is immediately present to us — the Creator is not.  I went
on to say there are certain ways we encounter traces of God, ways God
is indirectly present to us.  That sermon generated more responses than
anything I’ve preached in a while, and it must be because I departed
from the usual banalities about the presence of God and took seriously
the absence of God.

The Bible affirms God’s presence.  “My presence will go with you,
and I will give you rest.” (Ex. 33:14)  The Bible also names God Deus Absconditus,
the Hidden God (Is. 45:15).  We hold both in tension.  I am speaking
less lately about the presence of God because our ordinary experience
is of the absence of God.  Mystical experience is different, but most
of us are not mystics.  It is actually freeing not to need to have
dramatic experiences of the divine presence, grateful simply for the
traces of God found in nature, in human love and in religion.

Quaker writers have been teaching me about the practice of silence,
which they see as a kind of sacrament of the presence of God.  I am
more inclined, though, to see silence as a sacrament of the absence of
God.  In the emptiness of silence I turn my attention to the Hidden
God, whom I walk with by faith and not by sight.

Originally posted at As the Deer, part of the CCblogs network.