"The Lord made darkness his covering, his canopy around him - the dark rain clouds of the sky."
Psalm 18:11
"Those who look to him are radiant."
Psalm 34:5
I loved being present on the scene at this moment, not long after sunrise, because the mountains (Otis Peak on the left and Hallett Peak on the right) rising up in the background were mostly shrouded in dark shadows, while the aspen trees of Bierstadt Moraine in the foreground were all lit up and glowing. Thinking in terms of the pair of passages quoted above from the Psalms, we might imagine that the mountains symbolize the mysterious presence of God, while the glowing aspen leaves stand for the seeker who gazes upon God with the eye of the heart.
The Christian contemplative tradition emphasizes our human experience of God as one of darkness, both because God dwells in a place beyond ALL concepts and ideas, and because the seeker is wrapped in the intimacy of the divine presence like a child being held by a parent. Here, the child can't see the parent because he or she is hugged SO closely and intimately.
During contemplative prayer, we experience this divine embrace as a mysterious, nameless magnetic pull that holds our attention and draws us toward the dark, intimate core of our being where God dwells. The amazing thing, however, is the fact that our thoughts still keep on appearing - like golden aspen trees, radiant with the presence of divine love, jutting into the sky far above us as we dwell in our core. Paradoxically, it is as though there exists no divine Light - since God dwells in what appears to be darkness - yet all things nevertheless GLOW with the radiance of that never-appearing Light!
Photo: Bierstadt Moraine, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO; September 30, 2012
