The Light That Is Darkness

There is a strange haunting within me, a pull into the light that is darkness.

It is not the darkness of absence nor of despair but the unfathomable presence of God.

It is the darkness Moses entered when he climbed the mountain,

the stillness before the Word speaks,

the silence that swallows every other sound.

Psalm 64 says, “To You we owe our praise, O God, in Zion; to You we pay our vows, You who hear our prayer.”

Yet even the praise feels mute within me.

My lips form the words, but the heart falls silent,

as if language itself can no longer bear the weight of what has been revealed.

There is peace in that silence, though it frightens me.

I feel suspended between heaven and earth, stripped of all certainties,

with only the bare knowledge that He is

and that His being has claimed mine.

This darkness is not punishment.

It is the mercy of a God who hides Himself to heal me.

He draws me into the poverty of spirit that sees no light of its own

so that the true light may be born within.

I begin to see how necessary weakness is,

how every attempt to secure myself against suffering

is an act of mistrust.

Grace overturns my idea of reality.

It humbles strength, glorifies failure,

and hides glory beneath ashes.

When I am tempted to despair,

I hear the psalmist’s voice again.

“Save me, O God, for the waters have risen to my neck.

I have sunk into the mud of the deep and there is no foothold.”

The image is too precise to ignore.

It is the condition of the heart that has stopped fighting its fall

and has begun instead to cry from the depths.

There is no foothold here, only the downward motion into trust.

I am surrounded, as the psalm says, by those who provoke and wound,

and often the loudest of them live in my own mind.

They accuse, they whisper, they mock the slowness of grace.

But even here the Lord is near.

“You search out the earth, You water it, You fill it with riches.”

He waters the desolate ground of my soul.

He lets the tears fall like rain until new life pushes through the cracks.

I find that I can no longer pray as I once did.

The words of Scripture and the Fathers remain holy,

but they seem like faint lamps compared to the great silence that has claimed me.

It is not that I love them less.

It is that they have led me to the threshold where speech ends.

The psalms themselves seem to end in this place.

Lament turns to praise not because the pain is gone

but because the soul has discovered that God was in the pain all along.

“Let the poor see and be glad.

Seek God and your soul shall live.”

I cling to that line.

The poor are not those without bread but those without defenses,

who have been emptied of everything they once used to protect themselves from God.

Perhaps this is why silence feels like home now.

In the darkness I am no longer hiding.

The haunting becomes peace.

The silence becomes prayer.

And the darkness becomes light.