The metaphors we use are important. All language is basically metaphor, and all metaphors, in the end, breakdown. Insufficient to fully describe the reality they point to. Which is why we need multiple metaphors—even contradictory, or seemingly incompatible metaphors—to describe the indescribable. Truly great things can never be described head-on, in plain terms.
I can describe the sky as blue, and vast, and beautiful, but richer and more poetic language is needed to truly convey a sense of majesty and awe.
So it is with God. God must always be describe obliquely. And with multiple metaphors.
Christianity, at least in my experience, tends to talk a whole about God’s light, but not much his shadow. For obvious reasons. Light is a more positively nuanced metaphor than shadow. Light is bright and cheerful and warm and safe; shadow is dark and obscure and cold and uncertain.
God is light (1 John 1:5, for example). And God has a shadow (Psalm 91:1, for example). Light and absence of light. Supreme brightness, and lesser brightness. Clear visibility and dim visibility. He is both his own light source and the object which blocks his own light, casting his shadow upon the world.
God’s light is everywhere and God’s shadow is also everywhere because God is everywhere. Wherever you are, there is light, however dim. And wherever you are, your shadow follows. Wherever God is, in all his brightness, his shadow follows. It’s what shadows do. (Unless you’re Peter Pan, of course).
All that to say, the good news is that wherever you are—strolling along in the noon-day sunshine of the good life, or plodding through the valley of death—you’re in an equally prime position to experience the nearness of God.
