The absence of God. I am not sure how to describe this. It is not the ordinary, everyday absence. Normally people go around not thinking very much, if at all, about God. He is just not there, never has been and so there is no sense of absence. What has never been there cannot be absent. But for me there is a deep sense of absence – a sort of coming home to an empty house feeling. People ought to be there but they are not. God ought to be there but he isn’t. Because of the absence there is a sense of helplessness and powerlessness. There is a void where there ought to be a place to stand.
God has no name. There is a difference between the Christian personalist approach to meditation and the Buddhist impersonalist approach. What would be the experience of Ultimate Reality for those coming from such different directions? Obviously an individual’s worldview and historical context is going to colour his perceptions. This reminded me of something I read by Denys Turner this morning – ‘the undetached person denatures her world and cannot even properly enjoy it. She cannot meet with reality on its own terms, but only on her own.’
The possessive self gets in the way. We give things names, not because a name is something inherent in them, but for our benefit. By naming something we are asserting a certain propriety over that thing and it is then labelled and categorised and placed in our inventory of things. But God is not a thing among things. When Moses before the burning bush asked God his name the reply was, ‘I am who I am.’ This is not a name, though for the Jews it was to become a name, the tetragrammaton. But they always retained the intuition that it was not really a name by insisting that it should never be spoken. It is not a name because God does not have a name. We have names so that we may be identified, so that we may be distinguished one from another. In the encounter with God we do not meet a, or even the Father, nor the Son, nor the Holy Spirit. These are names we have applied to particular concepts. God is the wholly Other, utterly beyond any concept, or anything we could imagine. Language and concepts do not apply – only silence.
[Turner, The Darkness of God, p. 183]