Advent Unknowing
Last summer, I tried to write another Advent book. I’d been reading the mystical medieval work The Cloud of Unknowing -- for the first time, it was actually making some sense to me – and found myself writing notes for a book that might be something like An Advent of Unknowing. But after a few weeks of trying to slog it out, I couldn’t figure out a way to move forward or meet the needs of the publisher who invited me to write it.
The problem is that Advent is traditionally a time that we celebrate knowing God in a way that is sublimely tangible - a little baby. A baby is not much like a cloud. The Incarnation is the opposite of the numinous.
But Advent feels like a time of unknowing to me, regardless. It’s a season hemmed around by darkness and mystery, especially in the northern hemisphere as we near the winter solstice. A night sky flecked with stars is the traditional backdrop for the holy family, shepherds, and Magi. In my own life growing up, the highlight of Advent was going to church on Wednesday nights for a potluck and Christmas pageant rehearsal, when our old church building was transformed after dark into a boundless, sacred space, totally unlike Sunday mornings. There is the near unknowability, still, of what the heck “Incarnation” means. There are the unfathomable words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” of the Christmas Day gospel in the Episcopal lectionary.
The thing is, a knowable God has felt less real to me lately. The God I used to feel I knew so well and who I felt knew me seems more and more unknowable. Not in cold or distant way. Just more vast, less human, “further up and further in” as C.S. Lewis wrote.
Yes, Christianity in both scripture and tradition teaches that God’s voice can be recognized, that God is knowable — whether in Jesus, in the words of the Bible, in liturgy, in sacraments. But there is also a tradition in Christianity, equally scriptural and ancient, declaring that God cannot be known, that God is so beyond our human understanding that we can only say with certainty what God is not. That, as for Moses on Mt. Sinai, there is a “cloud of unknowing” between us and God that we can never cross, at least on this side of the kingdom. God – or what we humans name “God” in English – is less like a person we know and more of an Incomprehensible Something or Other.
Many notable Christians thought and wrote about this - Gregory of Nyssa (4th century), Maximus Confessor (7th century), John Scot Erigena (9th century), Thomas Aquinas (13th century), among others. It is called “negative theology” or “apophatic theology.” For example:
Erigena: We do not know what God is. God, Godself does not know what God is because God is not anything. Literally God is not, because God transcends being.
Aquinas: Now we cannot know what God is, but only what God is not; we must therefore consider the ways in which God does not exist, rather than the ways in which God does.
Lately, I feel most comfortable approaching God as an “it” - because a “he” or “she” or even “God” feels too much like another human being. Names that sounded odd and goofy when I was younger feel more true now – the holy, the ground of all being, the spirit (capital letters feel too definitive, somehow.) A directee of mine once wondered if God was like “a sound” across the universe. I often feel God as a sort of energy, vibration, warmth, or love all around and within me. God seems to describe Godself as a verb to Moses in Exodus: “I am becoming what I am becoming,” in one way to translate the Hebrew.
Barbara Brown Taylor puts it this way:
When I am dreaming quantum dreams, what I see is an infinite web of relationship, flung across the vastness of space like a luminous net. . . .
God is the web, the energy, the space, the light – not captured in them, as if any of these concepts were more real than what unites them – but revealed in that singular, vast net of relationship that animates everything that is. (73-74, The Luminous Web)
I don’t think it’s wrong or untrue to imagine this holy web as being like a Person or Father — who listens, talks, understands you — but the older I get, the more incomprehensible, unnameable, and beyond any human personality “God” feels to me.
But I am content with not knowing. I have tried to know, explain, and interpret so many things as a pastor, priest, and writer over the years. I don’t believe what the Church teaches and preaches is a total sham, but so much knowing and explaining has come to feel insufficient to me.
Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest and elder, explains better than I could how Advent can be a time of unknowing:
Advent was once (and still can be) a time of waiting, a time of hoping without knowing, a time of emptying so that we can be filled by the divine Presence. . . .
Not knowing or uncertainty is a kind of darkness that many people find unbearable. Those who demand certitude out of life will insist on it even if it doesn’t fit the facts. Logic and truth have nothing to do with it. If you require certitude, you will surround yourself with your own conclusions and dismiss or ignore any evidence to the contrary.
Advent for me is a time of unknowing, but I don’t know how to write a book about it. If you want to read one, check out Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s translation of The Cloud of Unknowing. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, which it didn’t to me for most of my life and barely does now, put it on a shelf someplace and maybe later it will. I’ve listed some other books that might be helpful, below.
My former bishop often quoted Augustine: “If you think you understand it, then it’s not God.” This may sound disorienting. I find it comforting and expansive.
Blessed Advent and Merry Christmas!
Heidi
RELATED BOOKS
The Cloud of Unknowing, Anonymous (14th century), translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher (2018).
The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion, by Barbara Brown Taylor (2000). A gorgeous book. I can’t understand why of BBT’s books this one is not more widely read.
Enchantment, by Katherine May (2023) – a book by a secular writer who senses and searched for the presence of a Divine Something in the world around her.
The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, by Richard Rohr (2009). A good primer on “unknowing” written by one of our best teachers for contemporary Christian contemplative life and practice.
PODCAST
“Fresh Air” with Christian poet and cancer survivor Christian Wiman - "I don't picture God at all. ... I don't think of God as an object at all," he explains. "I find it more helpful to think of God as a verb." His newest book, Zero at the Bone, just came in the mail, but I haven’t had a chance to crack it open yet.
SOME OF MY BOOKS
Everyday Connections: Reflections and Practices for Year B. Sermon prep! Personal reflection! Small groups! I put lots of wondering, poetry, humor, and serious meaty bits into this book, because that’s what I love in a book myself.
Advent in Narnia. This is a book I wrote for adults and big kids, back in 2015. Still going strong. Hope you love it as much as I do.
Holy Solitude. I wrote this book for Lent, on spending time alone as a spiritual practice connected to the traditional disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Lent begins on February 14.
I will mail a signed bookplate to you, to stick inside any of these books if you fill out a form on my website.
New here? Want to know more? For more about me, my spiritual direction practice, and my other books and writings, check out my website.
Your reflection really spoke to me - I also like Rohr’s name for the unnameable as “another name for everything.” Thank you for sharing your thoughts -
I so love this reflection. Count me among those who suspect that “The Cloud of Unknowing” is the perfect companion for Advent. You prompted in my mind an additional dimension. You know the critique of someone who is “absolutely certain of that which simply isn’t true.” Perhaps that describes the character and shape of the coming messiah as envisioned by the children of God. It made sense; it just happened to be wrong. They thought they “knew”, but were actually clouded with unknowing.