He was on the mountain for forty days, and what were those days like? Alone, the sky dense around him, the earth occasionally rumbling, and when he saw a glimpse of the divine, it was as if he was looking through stained glass, stained a deep sapphire. He sat and prayed, his hands folded neatly in front of his stomach, his legs crossed quietly, and he was like the Buddha beneath the bodhi tree, or Christ, caught praying in a future wilderness.
Later, the Syrian monk whom we call Pseudo-Dionysius found a model for his own prayer in Moses. “He enters into the gloom of the Agnosia,” Pseudo-Dionysius wrote, “a gloom veritably mystic, within which he closes all perceptions of knowledge and enters into the altogether impalpable and unseen, being wholly of Him Who is beyond all, and of none, neither himself nor other; and by inactivity of all knowledge, united in his better part to the altogether Unknown, and by knowing nothing, knowing above mind.” Agnosia is a closing off of the senses, so that the tangible world becomes unrecognizable, neither touchable, nor audible, nor scent-laden, nor flavorful, nor visible. For Pseudo-Dionysius, and the many, many mystics who came after him, this state of agnosia is the closest we can come to truly knowing God. For God is beyond our touch, our hearing, our scenting, our tasting, our seeing.
Yet a human being is more than a collection of sensory perceptions. Sitting alone on the mountain, deep within the divine cloud, Moses rested for the first time since he had heard a voice calling to him from the burning bush. When deprived of stimuli, the eye turns inward. Memory, desire, anguish, hope, joy, and hardship dance about within one’s mind. Day after day he had judged the people, settling their petty disputes. Day after day he had reassured them that they would be fed, that they would drink, that their bodies were worth something to God. He had fought Pharaoh and witnessed the calcification of Pharaoh’s heart. He had performed miracles. He had tried to make meaning of his experience, as we all do. But without silence, without rest, such meaning-making is necessarily surreptitious. Little jangling pieces of the puzzle present themselves, but there is no time or space to put them together. Blind, deaf, dumb, and numb, he still brought himself to the mountain, and I imagine that his forty days and nights were spent wrestling with that self, weeping sometimes, laughing, trying to make sense of all that had happened to him.
The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, writing in England in the fourteenth century, described the way in which the contemplating self is tempted to turn inwards. “When the soul first begins looking at this nothing, what does it see? As if gazing on a dark, mysterious painting, it sees depicted there all of its past sins, physical and spiritual…No matter where the soul turns, these sins never leave its eyes, until after a period of much hard work, bitter remorse, and countless tears, the soul has virtually rubbed them all away.” Moses must have confronted his mistakes and errors, his unkindnesses, his desire to flee from his mission, the inadequacy of his stammering voice.
In those forty days, he parsed every failure, rehearsed every mistake. And grew bored of them. Saw them for what they were. Only a partial truth, so small and unimportant that they could be subsumed in the greater truth of God’s love and silence. A spiritual agnosia embraced him, so that he could not sense himself, nor his past, nor his possible futures. Millennia later, the mystics would try to describe this, and find their descriptions cluttered with paradox. “At last, through infused contemplation and secret love, the soul transcends herself and all things and ascends to God,” St. John of the Cross wrote in the 16th century. “Love is like a fire. It rises perpetually upward, yearning to be absorbed at its very center.”
But his soul friend, Teresa of Avila, used an opposite metaphor. “The spiritual marriage…is like rain falling from the sky into a river or pool. There is nothing but water. It’s impossible to divide the sky-water from the land-water. When a little stream enters the sea, who could separate its waters back out again? Think of a bright light pouring into a room from two large windows: it enters from different places but becomes one light.” Fire, water, light, each description entirely inadequate, the attempt to put words to the wordless, images to the imageless.
This portrait of Moses, sitting in contemplation in the surreal mist, in the sapphire light, is an icon of a human being engaged in Contemplative Prayer. Not that Contemplative Prayer leads automatically to union with the divine. Not that you can sit to pray with that intention in mind. It is enough to experience noesis, the Greek term for the mind watching the mind. Thomas Keating has a famous metaphor for this. Imagine yourself sitting on a riverbank. Your thoughts are barges, slowly moving down the river. You can’t help noticing that they are present. But you shouldn’t climb aboard with them or travel with them. Just let them pass you by. Yourself, as watcher on the riverbank, is the mind. The boats on the river are the mind. The mind watches the mind. And sometimes, through grace, you experience a moment of unity with all things, and are infused with God’s love for all of creation.
Centering Prayer is a form of apophatic prayer. Mirabai Starr offers this definition, drawing on Pseudo-Dionysius:
“We must abandon all thoughts and sensory perceptions and embrace a darkness in which we wait patiently for an illumination that may or may not come. This is the via negativa, or “negative way,” and Dionysius attempts to describe God only in terms of what cannot be said about him. Knowing-by-not-knowing is also called apophasis because it describes what God is not. Apophasis is rooted in the Greek apophanai, meaning “to not say,” from apo, “not,” and phanai, “to say.” An apophatic approach to God literally means “to not say” or “to un-say” God.”
Moses, in his forty-day sojourn on Mt. Sinai, is understood by the mystical tradition to be engaged in apophatic prayer. Yet any reader of Exodus knows that the result of that prayer is chapter after chapter of wordy instruction. When he comes down the mountain, Moses doesn’t tell the people how to pray as he has just prayed. Instead, he tells them how he thinks God wants them to live. This is the paradox at the heart of the Sinai experience. Silence, unknowing, agnosia, lead to commandments, moral teachings, instructions on how to build the tabernacle and sew the priest’s robes. The boon that Moses brings to the people after forty days of unitive prayer is two stone tablets, and eleven chapters of the Book of Exodus that describe a radically different organization of culture, a covenantal relationship with God and with one’s neighbor, and a blueprint for building a kind of traveling Sinai that can shape a wandering people’s worship.
The priestly instructions in particular point to a very different kind of prayer than the apophatic prayer of unknowing. It is assumed that the people, collectively, will pray with words and images. Such prayer is traditionally called cataphatic. Cata means “with” or “according to.” Phanai, as we’ve seen above, means speech. Yet all of this speech, like the words in this essay, can be understood as being in service of silence.
The moral laws can bring one to a similar sense of unity with God, or at least a sense that the flow of one’s life is in harmony with the flowing water or the fire that Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross describe. The rabbis knew this, and spoke of it throughout the years. Take, for instance, this short passage from the Pirkei Avot, composed in Israel in the late 2nd to early 3rd centuries:
”Whoever occupies himself with the Torah for its own sake, merits many things; not only that but he is worth the whole world. He is called beloved friend; one that loves God; one that loves humankind; one that gladdens God; one that gladdens humankind. And the Torah clothes him in humility and reverence, and equips him to be righteous, pious, upright and trustworthy; it keeps him far from sin, and brings him near to merit. And people benefit from his counsel, sound knowledge, understanding and strength, as it is said, “Counsel is mine and sound wisdom; I am understanding, strength is mine” (Proverbs 8:14). And it bestows upon him royalty, dominion, and acuteness in judgment. To him are revealed the secrets of the Torah, and he is made as an ever-flowing spring, and like a stream that never ceases. And he becomes modest, long-suffering and forgiving of insult. And it magnifies him and exalts him over everything.”
A just society is one that is filled with such righteous people, although the rabbis also assured us that only thirty-six righteous people (the Lamed Vav Tzadikim) are sufficient to sustain the world.
The covenantal gift that Moses brings out of the silence of Sinai is a way of negotiating our relationship with the divine. We both seek and can sometimes know unity with God, but we also belong to the world, and the world can distract, wound, and elevate us. To be in the world is to be a self, while to be with God is to release the rigid container of self. Covenant is made up of praise and complaint. We praise God, asking divinity to draw near. But when we need ourselves to be functional in the world, we must find some distance from the totality of divinity, and we do this by complaining. This is Walter Brueggemann’s formulation. “The human self,” he writes, “is not an independent, autonomous agent but is always and necessarily preceded by a Thou, one radically other than us, who evokes, summons, authorizes, and “faiths” us into existence as persons.” We enter into a dialectic with this other, who is greater than we are, and therefore not commensurate with us, but willing to enter into a mutual relationship with us. Spirituality is the enterprise of coming to terms with this other in a way that is neither excessively submissive nor excessively resistant. The other always destabilizes us, undermining who we are or who we’ve chosen to be. We sometimes have to fend this other off, which we do through complaint and self-assertion, and we sometimes have to invite this other close, which we do through praise and self-abnegation. “Covenanting,” says Brueggemann, “consists in learning the skills and sensitivities that include both the courage to assert self and the grace to abandon self to another.” This is true of our relationship with God. It is also true of our relationships with one another.
The instructions for constructing the tabernacle and sewing the priest’s robes are arrangements for ritual, and that ritual is active and wordy. It doesn’t include idols, so images of the divine are not at issue. But it does include story. The names of the twelve tribes of Israel are engraved on the stones of “the breastplate of decision,” the overgarment that also hides the Urim and Thummim, used for divination, inside of it. On his very body, the priest wore the stories of the ancestors and their descendants, and when the Urim and Thummim were thrown to help with a major decision of national import, it was thought that the spirit of God guided their tumbling. The story of God’s guidance of Israel was present in these objects, as was the expectation of God’s future guidance.
These priestly instructions can be seen as a kind of guidebook to cataphatic worship. But all prayer needs instruction. There are many fine books on Centering Prayer, much ink spilled in trying to describe the wordlessness of apophatic prayer. All prayer is a practice, is taught, is entered into and reflected on. Images and imagelessness, words and wordlessness, spin about each other in an ongoing cycle of prayer and worship. A prayerful reading of scripture might end in contemplation. Contemplation might lead to a word spoken, an understanding shared. God is both unknowable and known. As Richard Rohr so beautifully put it, everything that we come to know about God leads to ten more unknowns, and we can rest only in momentary truths and certainties as we encounter the overwhelming, eternal truth of the Ground of All Being. We both ascend and descend from Mt. Sinai. We both disappear into the beauty of God and inscribe our limited understanding on stone tablets.
Works Cited
Brueggemann, Walter. The Covenanted Self: Explorations in Law and Covenant. Fortress Press, 1999.
“Pirkei Avot,” Sefaria, accessed October 9, 2026, https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei\_Avot.
Starr, Mirabai. The Interior Castle. Riverhead Books, 2004.
Starr, Mirabai. Dark Night of the Soul. New York: Riverhead Books, 2003.
