Into the Cloud of Unknowing

On December 10, 1941, a twenty-six-year-old writer named Thomas Merton drove through the Kentucky hills to the Abbey of Gethsemani. He had tasted literary success in New York, enjoyed the jazz clubs of Harlem, and built a reputation as a promising intellectual at Columbia University. Yet something relentless pulled him toward silence. When the heavy monastery doors closed behind him, Merton stepped into a life of radical obscurity — no audience, no applause, no clear sense of what God would do with him there.

For years, the monastery felt less like a summit and more like a fog. He rose at 2 a.m. for prayer. He labored in the fields. He waited. Much of that waiting felt formless, even disorienting — not unlike the thick cloud that settled over Sinai for six full days before the Almighty spoke a single word to Moses.

Exodus 24 reveals something pastors rarely preach: before Moses received the tablets, he sat in the cloud doing nothing. Six days of silence. Six days with no instruction, no revelation, just the heavy presence of God and the discipline of staying put.

Merton later wrote that contemplation begins "when you learn to be comfortable not knowing." Moses could have descended the mountain. Merton could have returned to Manhattan. Instead, both men trusted that the God who called them upward would eventually speak — and He did. The cloud is not the absence of God. It is the anteroom of His glory.