Prayer and God's Silence

I read a great column in Sojourners today, by Rose Marie Berger, on the experience of God's absence or silence. She writes:

"The early Christians described this experience of God’s absence or silence as the via negativa... one “relates” to God as the Vast Emptiness, the Dark Night, the Endless Expanse, the “Absent One,” as Mother Teresa put it. There is no language to build a bridge of human relationship with this aspect of the Divine. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, at the time a Presbyterian church elder, came close when he looked from the moon at the Earth suspended in infinite darkness: “Magnificent desolation,” he uttered."

It reminds me a bit of the text I'm working on for Sunday's sermon -- not too surprising; a lot of things seem to connect when I'm mulling something over. Isaiah 55:8-9, describes God's distance from us in this way:

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts."

There is so much about God that we can't grasp. In the context of the passage in Isaiah, this great height, this distance from God, is a promise of God's mercy. Because God is so different from us, God is so much better at showing mercy than we would be. It also seems to me that there is a freedom in realizing that we are not God, and hope in shifting the focus from our thoughts and ways to God's.