There are days when it feels as if God is as far away from me as is the farthest star. There are likewise days when it feels as if God is as close to me as my own breath, but nobody needs a sermon to survive those days. Those days, when God feels close, those days are sort of sermons in and of themselves, living representations of the presence of God in our lives, and thank God for that. We need days like that.

But there are other days, too, when God feels distant, or disconnected, or even absent. I suspect you know what this kind of thing feels like. It happens to all of us, even the preacher, when we experience things for which we do not have adequate language, when we struggle with what the Episcopal priest and writer Barbara Brown Taylor calls “the sayability of the world.” Words fail us at both extremes. Sometimes things happen that are so good they are difficult to express, a generous gift, perhaps, or the birth of a baby. But often these things that we struggle to say are horrific, so we quite literally use words like “unspeakable” and “unimaginable” to describe something so awful that words will not do.

On days when I feel as if God is far away, when I struggle to find the words for that feeling of absence, I try to remind myself that I am not the first Christian to feel this way. Far from it; history is littered with the writings of faithful Christian leaders who have felt the same silence, the same darkness. One of my favorite examples comes from the life of an anonymous, fifth century Syrian monk known only as the Pseudo-Dionysius. He writes of the darkness we sometimes feel as we struggle to understand the ways of God. He uses a term I adore, “super-luminous darkness,” to describe the feeling of being in the presence of God but being unclear about where to look. This monk believed that sometimes the best way to speak truthfully about God is to stop speaking altogether. And he has a unique way of talking about it. Now this is my own rendering of a point he made 1500 years ago, but here is how I think about it.

Imagine a clock face, and imagine yourself standing at 12 o’clock. Now, use all the words you know to describe God. God is loving, that gets you to one o’clock. God is powerful. That gets you to two. Keep adding all the words you know about God and eventually you will land at six o’clock, as far away from where you started as you can get. Now, start carefully taking those words away as if you were plucking fuzz from a well-worn sweater. Yes, God is loving, but God cannot be bound by the human word for love. Seven o’clock. Yes, God is powerful, but not in the ways humans understand power. Eight o’clock. Pluck the words from the air and you will find yourself back at 12 o’clock, perhaps not having all the language to describe God that you would like to have, but instead sitting in stunned silence at the mystery of God, experiencing what the eighteenth-century theologian Freidrich Schleiermacher called “a touch and a taste for the infinite,” or what one modern filmmaker calls “standing at the edge of the infinite abyss.” There is power there, in that stunned silence.

It’s a strange kind of wisdom, the wisdom of unknowing. Sitting in silence is not necessarily going to make you look like you have it all together. In some ways, it stands against the popular understanding of what a mature Christian is supposed to do. I understand this instinct because I embody it, as a professional religious person; after all, there is a reason that in the American south, ordained clergy are often addressed as “preacher.” If I showed up for this broadcast and just stayed silent, I don’t think you’d find the dead air all that compelling. And yet when I feel as if God is far away, I find that plumbing the depths of the silence that surrounds me to be the most faithful way for me to engage with my faith.

It’s a strange kind of wisdom, the wisdom of unknowing, and it stands against the ways in which the Corinthians were expressing their newfound faith in Jesus Christ. In 1 Corinthians chapter 2, the apostle Paul addresses the misguided way that the Corinthian people were judging faithfulness, which is to say they assumed that the most eloquent among them must have been the best Christians. They assumed that the people who looked like they had it all together must have been the most faithful, simply because they appeared to understand God. To put it plainly: the Corinthians confused confidence with faithfulness.

To all of this, Paul says, you’ve got it backwards. The point is not to look like you have it all together. Wisdom is not a fake-it-til-you-make-it proposition. The polish is not the point. Intimacy is the point. Connection to God is the point. If looking like you are faithful were the whole point, then on days when God feels far away, well, the whole structure of your faith would crumble. I wish I could say this were just an ancient problem, but it’s as modern a problem as there is in the church. We follow silver-tongued preachers because they appear to carry the wisdom of God. It was this way two thousand years ago, in the early church; it is this way, now, and yet here we have actual scripture that says, no, appearing polished is not the point. Intimacy is the point.

And so as to button up his argument, Paul reminds his Corinthian readers that they don’t even need to bother trying to fake wisdom, because the gift of the Holy Spirit means that we are connected to the depths of God. The Spirit searches everything, including the depths of God. No one has known those depths, except the Spirit. And we, God’s people, we have received that spirit. We are connected to the depths of God. I can think of no more intimate image in all of scripture. All this intimate connection requires of us is that we let go of the spectre of trying to be the best—behavior which Paul says keeps us separated from God. It is a spectre which also keeps us separated from one another, because trying to look the best or be the best has the corrosive side effect of pitting child of God against child of God. The polish is not the point. Intimacy is the point.

It happens in the church just as it happens in the world, which is why Paul is so careful to warn Christians against mistaking worldly wisdom for heavenly wisdom. They are not the same.

We are connected to the depths of God, if we are only willing to remove that which separates us from God and one another. On days when God feels as far away from me as the farthest star, I think of the many Christians throughout the centuries who have struggled with this reality. The Pseudo-Dionysius, writing fifteen centuries ago, encouraged us to do this by remembering that sometimes, sometimes the language we put on God separates more than it connects. Another early church father, writing around the same time and in the same region, was Dorotheus of Gaza, who described that connection another way. He had a vision of a giant wagon wheel, with a central hub and spokes which extended toward the outer rim. He imagined that on the outer rim of the wheel stood all of humanity, and at the hub was God. As humans approached God, traveling along those spokes, they could not do so without approaching one another. And, likewise, in approaching one another, they ended up closer to God.

There are days when it feels as if God is as far away from me as is the farthest star. When I stop worrying about how that makes me look, I find myself trusting that even when I can’t feel it, the connection I have to God is the most intimate connection there is. And on those days, I find myself saying, alongside all the saints, “Thanks be to God.” Amen.