If we are to speak of God as he is, then, we need to check what we say as often as possible against the touchstone of our experience of living towards holy encounter… God in Godself is beyond not just our language but our minds. We, who stand under God, don’t have the kind of perspective that would allow us to understand God…

In the same way, if you think about individual words and how we know what they mean, you’ll see that they work by dividing reality up into identifiable bits. Definitions enable us to home in on the right bit of reality – so that we can distinguish between a chair and a bed, for example, or between nutritious plants and poisonous ones. Words are a little bit like the machines that slice salami: they cut up reality into digestible chunks. But God isn’t a ‘bit of reality’. God is the source of the whole thing. So it’s not surprising that words won’t quite work properly when it comes to God.

JP Williams, Seeking the God Beyond: A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Apophatic Spirituality

We cannot go on referring to God as though God were something we had thought up, an optional extra to a real life lived among real things. God is not like that, not even remotely. God is no thing – no thing at all, but the open ground in which what is comes to be.. God is far beyond things, and in him all things live and move and have their being. (Acts 17:28)

But how does this realisation work? For a long time now I have been skirting the wilderness – since the recent pandemic, really. I have defended myself against the wilderness with too many words; and it is in the wilderness that God waits, and always has done. Sarah Bessey: “There isn’t anywhere you’ve been and there isn’t anywhere you’re going where you’re not at home in God’s love. The wilderness is home to God, even the wilderness inside you. Your life is already a place where God is quite at home.” (Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith, p.64)

To stand still in love, not in understanding – I’m coming to realise after all this time that that is the only opening to grace. What we are is too fragile, too malleable to do otherwise. As TS Eliot wrote in ‘Burnt Norton’, “humankind cannot bear very much reality.” It is only in admitting my own unknowing that I can listen intently enough into the silence to hear the approach of grace.