In the tomb there is darkness. A distressing absence. God is dead. We feel alone and abandoned. Desolate.

The mystics trust–welcome—this emptiness.

“See that nothing remains in your conscious mind save a naked intent stretching toward God. Leave it stripped of every particular idea about God (what he is like in himself or his works) and keep only the simple awareness that he is as he is.”

Thus, does the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing instruct us. In the long dark night of the Easter Vigil , we wait in this Unknowing, dying to our ideas and conceptions of God, so that we can recognize him in a new form. We become like newborns, open to receiving the love around us without any thought of what that love is, without any fear of what that love might entail. We rest in a “naked, stark, elemental awareness.” We simply are.

“And nothing more.”