All talk of the sacred is limited by our imaginations and our language. We are finite creatures trying to picture and talk about the infinite, an impossible task, by definition. We have no way of picturing the infinite or of adequately speaking about it. God, by definition, is ineffable, beyond conceptualization, beyond imagination, beyond language. The Christian belief that God is a trinity helps underscore how rich the mystery of God is and how our experience of God is always richer than our concepts and language about God. So, as Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes, any God who isn’t more intelligent, more powerful, and more enterprising than we are is not worth believing in, nor is any religion that doesn’t go beyond our imagination. Faith, if it is to have any depth and sustain us for long, has to ground itself, precisely, in something beyond our own imaginations and our own powers. God, by definition, is ineffable. Right off the top, that already tells us that everything we can imaginatively picture or rationally say about God is inadequate. Scripture tells us that we live, and move, and breathe, and have our being in God. We are in God’s womb, enveloped by God, and, like a baby, we must first be born (death as our second birth) to see God face to face. That’s faith’s darkness. John of the Cross submits that the deeper we journey into intimacy, the more we will begin to understand by not understanding than by understanding. Our relationship with God works in the same way. Initially, when our intimacy is not so deep with God, we feel that we understand things and we have firm feelings and ideas about God. But the deeper we journey, the more those feelings and ideas will begin to feel false and empty because our growing intimacy is opening us to the fuller mystery of God. Paradoxically this feels like God is disappearing and becoming non-existent. Faith, by definition, implies a paradoxical darkness, the closer we get to God in this life, the more God seems to disappear because overpowering light can seem like darkness.