I've come to prefer a God who is invisible and mostly silent. Not as a consolation for the God I wish I had, but because I've started to suspect the invisibility and the silence are the point. Start with the obvious complaint: an invisible God is a hidden God, and a hidden God is hard to trust, hard to love, hard to build a life around. I understand the complaint. I've made it myself, on worse days.
But lately I've noticed something else happening. God's invisibility doesn't function like an obstruction — a wall I have to get past to see anything clearly. It functions like a window. Because God isn't standing in the frame, I can see everything else. Because God stays quiet, I can hear everything else — scripture, other people, my own conscience, the actual noise of the actual world. Because God is "inactive," I get to be active. Agentic. God is never in my way.
This is a stranger claim than it sounds. Most theology treats divine hiddenness as a problem to be solved or a trial to be endured. I'm proposing it's closer to a gift being given continuously, in a form so unassuming it doesn't announce itself as a gift at all.
The sun is grace
I was sitting in the temple not long ago, thinking about the sun. It never stops giving itself away — atoms, light, heat, every kind of ray physics has a name for — and every bit of that giving costs the sun something. It is depleting itself, slowly, over eons, as the plain condition of being a source.
That's not a bad description of grace. Grace, as I've come to understand it through Adam Miller's reading of King Benjamin, isn't a reward for merit. It's prior to merit — given regardless of whether you're worth it, the way sunlight falls on parking lots and gardens without asking either one to earn it. The sun doesn't shine at you because you deserve light. It just shines, indiscriminately, and you happen to be standing in it.
And you don't look at the sun directly. You see everything else by means of it. That's the window claim again, but now with a body: light is what lets you see, precisely by not being the thing you stare at.
The nothingness that won't hold still
Here's where it gets harder, and where I have to admit something about how I do this. My process is heavily intellectual. I wish it weren't. But I have to use my brain to start somewhere, and this is the brain I've got.
So: sitting in the temple, I try to notice my own nothingness — the same nothingness Miller finds in King Benjamin's sermon, the thing that proves grace is original rather than earned, because if I were something in myself, grace could be suspected of being a payout. And I can't do it. It's very difficult to notice nothingness while you're sitting there. It is what it is, and what it isn't.
I think now that this isn't a failure of the exercise. It might be the exercise working correctly. If I could locate my nothingness, hold it up, confirm it — "there, found it" — it would stop being nothing and become a shape. An "amorphous entity," maybe, blurry at the edges, but still an entity. Still a possession. And a possessed nothingness is a contradiction; the moment it's graspable, it's already become the very thing my theology needs it not to be.
I recognize this taps into Zen — sunyata, emptiness that isn't "nothing exists" but "nothing holds a fixed, independent shape," including the self that goes looking. The koan doesn't want an answer. It wants to exhaust the part of you that demands one. Sitting in the temple without a takeaway to report might be the same discipline, dressed in different clothes.
The kind of God who would die on a cross
If this withdrawal — God's, and in some smaller echo, my own — isn't just a strategy but a character, then I think it's evidence of something: God's radical humility, and God's humanity.
Not humility as an add-on virtue draped over an otherwise maximal, all-powerful God. Something closer to the actual nature of the thing. A being who keeps vacating the center — invisible so the world can be seen, silent so everything else can be heard, out of the way so I can act — isn't withholding power out of politeness. That looks, to me, like the kind of God who would let himself be crucified rather than reach for the power that would have prevented it.
It explains something about the miracles, too. Most of them are healings. Not proofs of divinity, not demonstrations meant to accumulate as evidence — people healed, told not to tell anyone, sent back into their lives. If the miracles were about self-aggrandizement, you'd expect them to escalate, get louder, build a case. Instead you get the same modest miracle, repeated: someone in front of him, in need, made whole, credit deflected onto the one who was healed rather than the one who healed them. Humility is always found helping.
The long-lost friend
Brigham Young had an idea I love: that when we're reunited with God, God will be wholly familiar to us — like a long-lost best friend, not a stranger finally unveiled. Not an introduction. A recognition.
I want to go a step further. I think we'll realize God was behind us, or beside us, the entire time — in the breeze, in the scent of flowers, in the ocean, in the stars, in gravity itself. It will all seem like him. Not resembling him. Being him, recognized late.
That's the medium and the ether of it all. Not God hiding behind the world, pulling the strings from somewhere else. God diffused through the world as its medium — the ocean, the gravity, the thing you were standing in the whole time without knowing it had a name, and a face, and had been your friend since before you could remember meeting.
Why the hiddenness has to stay hidden, for now
I don't think this collapses into "God is just nature" — that flattens the friend back into the weather. It's closer to a claim that the world is charged with someone, the way Hopkins meant it, the way Paul meant it in Athens: that we live and move and have our being in something that was never actually far off.
But the recognition can't come early. That's not a loophole in the theology; it's required by it. If I could confirm right now, mid-breeze, "yes, that's him" — it would become graspable, an amorphous entity again, evidence instead of grace. The friend has to stay unconfirmed a while longer, or he stops being the kind of friend this whole essay has been trying to describe.
So I keep sitting in the temple, not noticing my nothingness, using my brain because it's the tool I have, waiting for a familiarity I can't yet call by name — trusting that the waiting itself is not absence, but a very quiet, very costly, very ordinary form of being loved.
