1. Entering the Cloud

Introduction

Now the appearance of the glory of the LORD was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel. And Moses entered the cloud and went up on the mountain.

Exodus 24:17–18

I sat on the top of a barren mountain in the dark of early morning and prayed for wisdom. I was sixteen years old. Many decisions awaited me, and there were not enough years behind me to show me the path ahead. As the first rays of the sun illumined the horizon, I had a sudden sensation that I was being embraced by something unseen. Peace filled my body and eased my youthful mind. In that moment, seated high above the world, I knew that God is Love and that the purpose of my life is to love without ceasing.

Two years later I enrolled in an evangelical Protestant college with the intention to become a pastor. During the first semester I was told that the path to God is found only in the Christian scriptures. Eager to fulfill the commission I felt within me, I poured myself into that sacred text. I spent so much time studying, my college friends joked that I was trying to read every book in the library. After three years, I realized that an intellectual grasp of the Bible was not going to lead me into the presence of God. Though I read commentary after commentary, I was only hearing the voices of human opinion, not the voice of the One I sought.

As a result, I shifted my academic pursuits to historical theology, believing that there was still a living knowledge held within the older traditions. I attended the Roman Catholic Mass, visited monasteries, and read about the desert monastics. Eventually, I learned about the Eastern Orthodox tradition and the ancient teaching known as hesychasm, which is the spiritual practice of encountering God within the silence of the heart. I was immediately drawn to that prayerful lifestyle, thinking that, after years of restless searching, I had at last found the path that would lead me back to the top of the mountain.

Later that year I began working as a hospital chaplain and spent my days alongside people who were sick and dying. As I paced the sterile halls and prayed with those who felt fully the fragility of this earthly life, I was overcome with a sense of impotence and confusion. Though my prayers were earnest, I could not make sense of how a loving and intimate God could be so seemingly uninvolved with the devastation that unfolded daily before me.

One Saturday afternoon, I watched a man suffocate to death because his heart could no longer function. As he struggled for his final breaths, I stood as far away from him as I could, limply leaning against the cold, metal doorframe. The moment his heart ceased to beat, his wife looked up at me with disgust in her eyes and said, “How can you watch this everyday?” I could not answer her. The unabated horror I beheld in that place of healing had become too much for me. When I returned home that night, I placed my Bible, my education, and my faith upon the shelf, and I turned away from Christianity.

Death and New Birth

The years that followed were not happy ones for me. I enrolled in a doctoral program for clinical psychology, hoping to express my longing to love in the context of psychotherapy. I thought that, as a counselor, I could rely on an intricate knowledge of human emotion and relationships to guide others out of pain and into a sustained experience of the peace I once felt. Despite the outward appearance of success, I continued to wrestle with an inward sense of emptiness. Listening to heart-wrenching stories on a daily basis and attempting to hold the endless sufferings of those who came to me for help, I began to lose hope that what I felt on that mountain years before was anything more than a delusion of naivety.

As so much was dying within me, I learned that my grandfather’s life was coming to an end. I returned to my childhood home for one last visit with him before he died. My grandfather was a hard and disciplined man who was masterful in his work, though not necessarily in his words. As I approached him to say goodbye, he looked at me with his piercing eyes and said, “Listen, Josh. Every morning I talk with God, and God talks to me. He tells me what to do everyday.” My grandfather had never spoken with me about his faith. His simple, yet intimate disclosure, delivered at such a defining moment, left me speechless. In the heavy silence that followed, as he intently held my gaze, I could not help but wonder if he was mistaking his own musings for the voice of the Divine.

He saw right through me. “You don’t believe me,” he said with a smile.

His sudden unveiling of my doubt woke me from a dream I didn’t know I was having. Something shifted inside me. After years of disappointment, I knew—deep within me—that I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe that the God who met me on the mountain was real, and that this same God would one day meet me again. “I do believe you,” I said as I broke his gaze, “I just don’t understand.” He turned toward the workshop that he built with his own hands many decades before, the place that sustained his lifetime of labor, and said to me, “You’re young. You will someday.”

When my grandfather died, I started to pray again. After telling myself that God was nothing more than an intellectual construction formed out of my own psychological longings, I did not know what prayer even meant. In a state of renewed innocence, without words or rituals, I opened wide my heart to receive whatever would be given.

As I did so, day after day, month after month, something unexpected began to change within me. I started to see things that I had never seen before. At first, they seemed like shadows or fleeting glimpses of light. Yet, as the images grew clearer with time, I discovered that I was seeing the spiritual world.

This awakening of spiritual perception was empowering. In my counseling practice, I realized that I was able to observe the spiritual state of my clients before they entered my office. I could see inner exhaustion and untapped resiliency. I could see the brokenness of despair and the brilliance of expanding love. I could see suffocating shame and the soul’s light that somehow still remained under that heavy shroud. These new insights significantly enriched the quality of my work, and my clients were healing.

On an interpersonal level, though, I did not know how to handle my new level of awareness. In daily interactions with neighbors and acquaintances, I became increasingly uncomfortable, uncertain, and withdrawn. I even started to distance myself from some of my closest friends, afraid they would ask me questions I did not yet know how to answer. I felt like a toddler, simultaneously in awe of and overwhelmed by a world that was so much larger than I.

Once during this tumultuous transition I awoke in the middle of the night and hiked to the top of a nearby mountain. With the stars stretched across the sky above me, I once again opened my heart to the heavens and prayed for wisdom.

In that moment two angels appeared beside me. Without speaking, they took hold of my arms and lifted me up into a stream of golden light. As they carried me, I saw many others join our procession and, moving together as one, we continued onward until we reached a towering city of gold. The gates that guarded the way swung open before us, and the angels carried me to the center of that great city, where there sat a pile of shimmering gold bars.

“Eat,” one of the angels commanded. He began to feed me the bars, placing them directly into my mouth. One after another, I swallowed the gold that was given to me and felt again the warmth and peace I had known so many years before.

After a time that seemed never-ending, I heard a voice proclaim, “Feed my people the gold.” Turning around, I beheld thousands of men and women, all waiting to receive the heavenly food.

The next moment I was standing once again on the soil of the Appalachian mountain looking out in all directions. Before me, the lights of the city began to compete with the brilliance of the morning sun. Behind me, the mountains were awash with sunlight. I stood for a long time, watching the world wake up around me. The day was chasing away the night, and my life would never be the same.

Within three months, I quit my job and moved my family to a secluded place to focus on the meaning of that vision. Since then I have spent thousands of hours, not reading or studying, but simply standing in my heart. From that sacred place within me, the Mount Sinai in my chest, I “entered the cloud” of God’s Word.

The Idolatry of Abstraction

After Moses led the ancient Jewish people out of captivity and into the wilderness, he brought them to meet God on the mountain.¹ God appeared as fire and smoke with the sound of unseen trumpets, causing the Earth to tremble and shake. Terrified, the people drew back and pleaded with Moses saying, “You speak to us, and we will hear; but let not God speak to us, lest we die.”² According to their own admission, they valued their earthly lives more than having a direct encounter with God’s Word.

Moses was different. He walked into the fire on the mountain and entered the “thick darkness”³ of God’s presence. For forty days and forty nights, Moses abided within the Word of God.

However, the men and women below grew impatient from waiting. Too afraid to approach God directly, some of them chose to make a new god of their own. They fashioned a calf of gold and declared to the people, “There are your gods, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!”⁴

I too had replaced God with a golden calf of my own making. Throughout my years of academic and religious strivings, although I wanted intimate and direct knowledge of God, I instead sought detailed knowledge about God that was intellectual and theoretical. In a desperate effort to make the Creator of the cosmos into something I could easily comprehend, systematically describe, and rationally control, I unwittingly crafted a new god out of abstraction.

An abstraction is a concept that is based on imagination or speculation, separate from any reality that can be observed. The natural world does not contain abstractions. God has never made an abstraction. It is we who make abstractions with our minds.

For years I had talked about God and Jesus, faith and grace, sin and salvation. But where did I acquire my knowledge about such topics? Did I learn about God through direct encounters with the Word? Did I preach about God’s Love because Love was a spiritual reality that abided within my soul? Or was I merely wielding the tools of cognitive speculation and analysis of historical texts in order to forge ideas that resembled reality but were lifeless within? Like the Israelites of long ago, I had embraced concepts as comfortable substitutes for a direct encounter with the living God.

I was not alone in this sin of idolatry. A long history of crafting golden abstractions has resulted in the Christian religion becoming little more than a valley of dry bones.⁵ Now I know, though, that only when the Word abounds within us are we set free from the deceptions that spread like cancer within our churches, and able to love in a manner that breathes eternal Life into all that is.

A Gift to be Shared

Like a child receiving a gift for which he hardly allowed himself to hope, I cannot put into words the joy I feel when I enter the sanctuary of my soul and encounter God, waiting to receive me with unbounded Love. After years of grief and empty strivings, I have begun to feast at God’s great banquet.⁶ I write these words to share the nourishment of God’s Love to whomever will receive it.

All that I have experienced is a gift. My hope is that by offering to you that which I have “seen with my eyes” and “touched with my hands,” you will join me on the path up the mountain, so that as we reach the summit together, on that day of all days, “our joy will be complete.”⁷

(Click here for Chapter One)

1. Exodus 19:17

2. Exodus 20:19

3. Exodus 20:21

4. Exodus 32:4

5. Ezekiel 37:1–2

6. Luke 14:24

7. 1 John 1:1,4