Abstract
In the temple at Shiloh, in the night’s quietest hours, the boy Samuel lay alone in the darkness. The temple or tabernacle housed the Ark of God; the Covenant Box which contained the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. On Mount Sinai, Moses, the greatest of the prophets, wrote out the Laws of God, chiselled from lapis lazuli, a deep-blue metamorphic rock. The Ark had been the vanguard of the Hebrew slaves as they made their pilgrimage through the wilderness to the Promised Land. Honoured to be the servant of the priest Eli, Samuel served before the face of Yahweh.
The Ark was made of wood and on its lid sat two cherubim: composite creatures with the body of a lion or bull, head of a human and the wings of an eagle. This was the throne of the
The lamp of God had not yet gone out; sunrise was still some hours away. An earthenware vessel filled with oil, the flame spread its light and cast shadows around the room of the temple. A scene of light and darkness, movement and stillness, this was a liminal space, a boundary between earth and heaven, time and eternity. In this ancient story, it is not incidental that the eyesight of the priest Eli was failing. In Scripture, blindness often means more than a mere physical deterioration; it is spiritual blindness. Perhaps the priest was no longer open to the possibility of seeing the Divine. By contrast, it seems that Samuel’s heart and mind were open to Mystery, to the elusive Presence of the Eternal, as he lay down in the temple, as he served faithfully in the tabernacle day after day. In the dark silence, in his soul, Samuel heard the voice of the Sacred. He replied, ‘Speak, for your servant is listening’.
In the Hebraic storytelling of the Tanakh, with its vivid anthropomorphic language, we are led in meditation into the company of Samuel, into the room housing the Ark and, ultimately, into the mystical Presence of the Holy One. In speaking of his own life experience, Bernard of Clairvaux said: However often he comes, I have never been aware of the movement of his coming. I have known he was there; I have remembered his presence afterward; sometimes I had an inkling that he was coming. But I never felt it, nor his leaving me. . .. He did not enter by the eyes, for he has no colour; nor by the ears, for he has made no sound; nor by the nostrils, for he is not mingled with the air. . ..
For Bernard, encounter with Eternity was an awareness, a spiritual sensation, and an openness of heart and mind. In the Gospel of John, Nathanael sat under the fig tree which was a symbol of discipleship and study. Read spiritually, it was through his patient, prayerful absorption of Scripture that, over time, Nathanael shaped his soul, carved out a hollow, as a dwelling-place for encounter with Jesus. Samuel resting with the Ark was a symbol of his closeness to God, as close as Moses had been, and his lying down a symbol of the peace, the shalom, the young boy had found in God’s intimate Presence. Gently, Samuel had prepared his soul, the core of his being, to receive the Shekhinah. The distinguished Glasgow minister, the late George Morrison of Wellington, said:
It is in the soul within us, in the hidden sanctuary, in the silence and
secret of the human heart that the union which is true blessedness is won,
and the vision is granted which is peace.
God is encountered through myriad different paths. In his memorable poem composed near Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth sat under the dark sycamore, cast his eye over lofty cliffs, the quiet sky, hedgerows and wreaths of smoke. As if in a trance, he wrote: And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused. . ..
Are these not feelings we would readily attribute to God? Is God not the Sublime that penetrates the whole of creation: the majestic beauty of mountains, the melodic song of birds, the freshness of summer rain, the greenness of grass and the whiteness of snowdrops? Bernard called the Holy Spirit ‘the kiss of the Father’.
God may be encountered through darkness. Throughout Scripture, there are many times a life is changed, touched by the Divine in darkness. Darkness may be a physical reality, an absence of light, or a spiritual state of being. It may be an overwhelming, life-diminishing experience of suffering or perhaps a painful and seemingly fruitless search for God. In the mystical tradition of Christianity, darkness can be the deliberate abandonment of our familiar and comforting images, theologies, and feelings about God. We can be at sea when we realise that every image, theology or feeling about God is itself not God. Resting in the darkness, as Samuel did, is perhaps a symbol of the most profound spiritual encounter: it is a tentative, intuitive reaching beyond what the rational mind can grasp.
In his exquisite poem, The Night, the seventeenth century poet Henry Vaughan reimagines the encounter of Nicodemus with Christ under the cover of darkness. For Vaughan, darkness was ‘that sacred veil’ under which Wise Nicodemus ‘Did at midnight speak with the Sun!’ It was at ‘that dead and silent hour’ in the soul’s ‘calm retreat/ Which none disturb!/ . . . God’s silent, searching flight’ is made. Vaughan closes his poetic dream: There is in God, some say, A deep but dazzling darkness, as men here Say it is late and dusky, because they See not all clear. O for that night! where I in Him Might live invisible and dim!
‘Dim’: a suggestion that God is always just out of sight, beyond clear memory and our best imagining. The psalmist assures us that, whatever the darkness may be in our lives, darkness is not dark to God. There is no place in all creation, never a time, whatever we think and however we feel, when God would abandon us. We are treasured: God’s eyes beheld us in the womb, from unformed substance, when in secret we were made, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Scripture is nourishment for the soul. Take yourself into that room with Samuel. Be aware of Eternity’s embrace. Let God lift your soul. Rise up, as Samuel did. Is that rising up not a hint of new life, of resurrection? In the darkness, we are born again.