Winter: Part II
Darkness, the Apophatic God, and cowboy boots
Writer’s note: read Winter: Part I to follow my train of thought for the full experience :)
I sink back into my pillow, the lamp beside my bed clicking off. It’s my fourth consecutive day of lying in my bed, those blue, blue walls. The clothes still on the drying rack. My ability to think beyond two steps is still gone. Emails from a rental agency keep chirping from my phone, but any attempt to fill out the forms produces a feeling like the back of my head is about to separate from the pangea of my skull. Any sliver of light coming through the gap in the curtain causes me to hiss and shrink back like a vampire.
James K.A. Smith recently wrote a Substack article titled “Stop Looking for the Light: Listen to the Dark.”1 He writes, “What if, instead of chasing the light, we got curious about the dark? … What if the dark is a door to a different sort of discovery?” he points to the mystics who “testify to the luminosity of the dark.”
“Make your home in this darkness. Stay there as long as you can.”2
Strangely, the PA at the Urgent Care tells me the same thing. No rushing back to work, or trying to step out of the house into that bright Colorado sun. Stay in the dark, stay away from screens, and sleep. Make your home in the darkness and stay as long as you can.
Smith continues, “Something happens in the dark, the mystics attest, that can only happen there… When we are “in the dark,” we lack the mastery and control of knowledge. This vulnerable vertigo of un-knowing, the mystics counsel, harbors the potential for liberation. What we learn in the dark is how to let go.”3
I indeed have succumbed to the “vulnerable vertigo of un-knowing”, feeling estranged from my normal sense of self. Normal activities like reading or watching movies are untenable. Even trying to think and reflect is impossible, I become like a novice monk, removing all thoughts from my head, lest the cruel Abbot of my headache come back with its cudgel.
Smith quotes Meister Eckhart, “You’re never closer to God … than when you are in utter darkness and unknowing.”
The concussion left me in utter darkness and unknowing, but even before my unfortunate encounter with a volleyball, I was there. In silence. In the garden. In my blue, blue room. I was like a cicada husk, my sadness had hollowed me out, my ribs weathered and grooved like the canyon walls of Glenwood Springs. I was slipping backwards into a black hole, disappearing again.
Was this really the place where God was closest to me? I felt like I could only sense a hollow emptiness. In myself, and in any effort to think about God.
As I emerged from the liminal space of my concussion, my mind kept circling back to the idea of an Apophatic God.
Apophatic theology or ‘negative theology’ is a way of speaking about God in negation, or only in terms of what may not be said about God, emphasizing God’s transcendence and unknowability. It pairs with Cataphatic theology which approaches God through a lens of immanence, affirming who God is, i.e. God is Love, or God is Beauty. Both Apophatic and Cataphatic lenses are important components to Christian understandings of God.4
I become acquainted (if such a thing can be said) with this apophatic God in this empty darkness. It feels like when I am driving down the cosmic highway at night, listening to music from the tinny radio in the Honda when all of a sudden, it glitches and shuts off, leaving me rocketing into the dark in absolute silence.
“Paul is plunged into darkness… Only when he rose from the ground, blinded, was he finally able to see God.”
I emerge from the darkness of my concussion in time for book club. We are reading Flourishing on the Edge of Faith. In the chapter titled: Hallowed be Your Name, DeCort writes that “speaking of God with reverence requires this double-motion of both delighting in God’s loving Presence and disavowing any false grasp on God. With Jesus, we learn by unlearning how to say God’s name. We rediscover God by losing “God.”5
DeCort tells the story of Jacob, who, in wrestling with the angel, “meets a God that he didn’t know and couldn’t name.” In fact, “God refuses to reveal God’s name.”6
Later, when Moses asks God’s name at the burning bush, God replies by naming “Godself in the future tense: I-Shall-Be-Who-I-Shall-Be.” This is a god who cannot be contained or manipulated by human desire. In the ancient world, knowing a god’s name was used to control the god’s power, enabling a human to use the god for their own ends. Yahweh refuses to be contained by this logic. As Bonhoeffer writes, “There can be no point in human life when we can speak of God as our possession… God is always the One who is to come; that is God’s transcendence.”7
I must admit to myself that I, like Jacob, wished to use God for my own desires. And really, who doesn’t? I often fall for this prosperity gospel, that if I am good, and righteous, and like Rodrigues, ‘serving God far from home,’ I will be blessed, I will be protected from harm, and I will always feel God’s presence. If I remain on the straight and narrow yellow brick road, I will skip like Dorothy all the way to the Emerald City.
This seems not to be so.
DeCort writes that “In the darkest night of his life, [Jacob] meets a God that he didn’t know and couldn’t name. And it’s this loss of control that sends him limping towards reconciliation with his worst enemy.”8
I limp home from the doctor’s office. There’s a mirror on top of my dresser, but I can’t quite make eye contact. The next morning I am sitting in the counselor’s office and she tells me I need to find a part of myself that is courageous enough to change my situation. I need to find something within myself to save me.
This tends to be a concept I am skeptical of, not wanting to fall for some sort of shallow pop psychology. But post concussion, I begin to consider it. Sometimes, a poor view of yourself can lead to a skewed view of others. In the words of a friend, I hear the quiet whisper of God, and a peace falls over me. Maybe I’ve been looking at this all wrong. Maybe I need a more expansive view of God, and a more expansive view of myself. God is not just Gandalf searching for lost kittens on command. I am not just a helpless peon in need of saving. I am not a passive spiritual damsel in distress.
It may be time to practice seeing Christ in myself.
That night I go with friends to the movie theater. It’s an exciting outing because the movie was filmed in the San Luis Valley and everyone is excited to see the place we love on film. We settle into our seats to watch Rebuilding.9 It follows the story of Dusty, a cowboy whose ranch has been destroyed by a forest fire, forcing him to sell his remaining cattle and live in a trailer park for climate refugees. He’s lost everything, including the identity so precious to him. As he is reckoning with this, he is also reconnecting with his daughter, taking her to read and do her homework. This is the story he reads to her, over the course of the movie:
There is a cowboy, who has magical boots which allow him to travel all over the world and see all sorts of incredible things. But one day, the cowboy grows out of his boots. He panics because this means he will no longer be able to magically travel anymore. He tries all sorts of things to make the boots fit again. Eventually he gives up. It is in that moment that he realizes that the shoes weren’t magical after all- he was the one that had the magical ability within himself.
Tears roll down my cheeks in that dark theater. The magic is in the cowboy not in his boots! God is not something I must possess and control so I can access God’s power. The presence of God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, is within me, regardless of what is going on.
Henri Nouwen writes, “You must believe in the yes that comes back when you ask, ‘Do you love me?’ You must choose this yes even when you don’t experience it.”10
I go home and re-listen to the soundtrack from O’ Brother Where Art Thou.
“I am a man of constant sorrow… no pleasures here on earth I found, for in this world I’m bound to ramble. I have no friends to help me now.”11
Ironically, the line “I have no friends to help me now” is sung by two back up singers, who are, in fact, the friends of the lead. I begin to imagine God harmonizing along to my sorrow. Somehow both affirming my dirge, and perhaps gently contradicting it.
I only have a few more days here in Alamosa. I savor the time I have left in my blue, blue room. I go for a final walk by the Rio Grande. My not-so-magical boots caked in mud. I listen to the song and I smile. During my time here, I have learned to see God in Mount Blanca, I have learned to feel the pursuit of God from the foxes on the river bank, and I think about God every time I see a raven swooping low over the telephone poles behind my office. I stare into my reflection in the purple hibiscus tea. I am learning to see God here too. To hear the faint echo, the whispered yes, that comes back.
Substack. “Stop Looking for the Light: Listen to the Dark.” Substack, substack.com/@jameskasmith/p-185725549. Accessed 19 Mar. 2026.
Substack. “Stop Looking for the Light: Listen to the Dark.” Substack, substack.com/@jameskasmith/p-185725549. Accessed 19 Mar. 2026.
Nicholas Bunnin and Jiyuan Yu. “The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy: negative theology”. Blackwell Reference Online.
DeCort, Andrew. Flourishing on the Edge of Faith: Seven Practices for a New We. BitterSweetBooks, 2022, 26.
DeCort, 26
DeCort, 29, 32.
DeCort, 29.
Rebuilding If you want a lovely movie filmed in and loosely about the San Luis Valley, and want to see a little more of the beauty that is here - look no further! Plus, a lovely performance from Josh O’Connor.
DeCort, 1.
WINTER Parts I & II offer us such a raw and rich view of the human experience wrought with ourselves and reminded of the gift of Himself. Soooo good, Emily!