Twilight Zone
The Luminous Dusk: Finding God in the Deep, Still Places
by Dale C. Allison, Jr.
Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2006
(178 pages, $14.00, paperback)
reviewed by Robert W. Grano
Our convictions, however much they may be thought of as the conclusions of arguments, are often heavily indebted to environmental factors we fail to perceive because we are too close to them,” Dale C. Allison, Jr., writes in a revised and expanded version of his 1995 book The Silence of Angels. One of the factors we do not see provides his somewhat surprising thesis: Modern man’s separation from nature is a cause of secularization, rather than merely a symptom or result of it.
Allison, who teaches New Testament and Early Christianity at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, points to “an obvious yet often overlooked connection: Seeming secularization correlates directly with a growing physical separation from the so-called natural world. In other words, the more we have moved indoors, the less some of us have been inclined to believe.”
Attenuated Wonder
One way in which this separation has diminished our ability to believe is through the growing absence of a sense of wonder before the natural world. Our forbears saw the world as full of both wonderful and terrifying mysteries, but scientific and technological advances have attenuated the wonder and assuaged the terror. They give us less reason to appeal to or depend on a divinity.
For example, we now have almost universal control over darkness and light, thus changing one aspect of our sense of wonder, the fear of darkness. Allison, quoting St. Cyril of Jerusalem, notes that in a certain sense devotion is dependent on darkness:
When does our mind tend more towards psalmody and prayer? Is this not at night? When do we come oftener to the remembrance of our own sins? Is it not at night? Therefore let us not perversely entertain the thought that God is not the author of darkness, for this too is good and most useful.
Light is a good thing, but it can also be a hindrance to the life of faith, in that it enables us to perceive more readily the distractions around us (which is one reason most of us pray with our eyes closed). The words from Isaiah, “I am the God who made the light and created the darkness,” are “an invitation to enter the shadows, in the hope of discovering what Cyril called that ‘night whose darkness is daylight.’ . . . God hides in the darkness, so to the darkness we must go.”
The contemporary ubiquity of noise and the corresponding absence of silence that has resulted is also bad for piety: “The entirety of the Christian tradition is here seconded by the rest of the world’s sundry religions, which with one voice advise that faith without silence is dead.”
Silence, therefore, must be specifically sought out and cultivated. “The point for us is that silence is, in the Christian tradition, a virtue, and it is embodied by God. Does this not become for us an imperative—God’s silence is our example?”
Robert W. Grano is a freelance writer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is a regular book reviewer for All Hallows: The Journal of the Ghost Story Society. He is a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy via the Assemblies of God and the Episcopal Church.
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