Dazzling Darkness
Introduction Perhaps there was a time when I could have told a hundred stories about myself. Now I realise I only have one that matters. I’ve spent half my life wishing it were otherwise; wishing that my story would be glamorous, heroic, admirable or, indeed, simple. But that is not what I have to offer. The only story I have is a confession. In many ways I am not proud of what I have to tell. For this confession – even if it is the story of an honest wrestling with my longings for wholeness, for the Divine and self-knowledge – is really the story of failure and loss. And of the hope that remains in the midst of them. It is a story, in some respects, then, about what is conventionally seen as ‘darkness’. And yet I have discovered that though darkness is normally seen as negative, it is as much a positive place as anything else. It is a place, I believe, inhabited by the Living God – what I want to call the Dark God or the Hidden God. This is the God that many of us, because we try to make our lives safe and comfortable, are too afraid to meet. And so this is an account of my wanderings in the company of the Dark or Hidden God: the God who comes to us beyond our comfortable categories; who meets us in the darkness; who is most alive in those things we commonly associate with the Dark – failure, loss and brokenness. This is the God who will not be used and made to serve our ends and who therefore is the Living God. For as Meister Eckhart puts it, ‘To use God is to kill him.’ There is, I shall suggest, something profoundly troubling about
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