How Grief Led Me to Rediscover the Divine Presence I Thought Had Gone Silent
There are times when the weight of life feels so overwhelming that it crushes every prayer out of you.
A family member — a dear woman who had helped raise me like a second mother — had developed a growth, and the doctors were speaking in ominous tones about it. “We’ll need more tests,” they said, but we all knew what that could mean.
I couldn’t sleep that night. Or the one after.
That week, I went to three church services hoping for some relief, hoping that the passionate worship, the uplifting sermon, or the enthusiastic Christians would lift the burden.
But each time I walked out of church, I felt more and more distant — from God, from the world, and from myself.
Then, on the following Saturday, I decided to take a walk in the forest. I wasn’t expecting anything; I just needed some fresh air. At first, I was so absorbed in my thoughts that, despite the exceptionally beautiful autumn day, I barely noticed anything around me.
But somewhere between the soft whispers of the pines and the rhythmic crunch of the leaves beneath my feet, something shifted, and then it lifted. A quiet groan rose from within me — something incoherent, almost infantile.
And in that moment, it opened. And I heard it.
Or should I say, I saw it? Smelt it? Touched it?
The Awakening of the Senses
The shimmering kaleidoscope of November leaves.
The soothing breath of the autumn wind.
The innocent rustle of a nearby brook.
The distinct aroma of the nearby pines.
The sun! It had been so luminously present that whole day — how had I missed it?
As my senses awakened, I became attuned to the surrounding tapestry of natural beauty, and suddenly, I realized I was experiencing something real.
Not some abstract energy or vague spirit of the woods. Not Mother Nature. But the living God of the Christian scriptures. The one who walked the Garden and calmed the seas. The one who still speaks precisely through such glory in creation today.
The Music of the Spheres
After that day, I spent more time reflecting on what I had experienced in the woods. It’s never been my way — as a lifelong urbanite — to feel close to God through encounters with nature like this. But as I began to research the matter, I found that the Church Fathers had much to say about creation being a form of revelation — much like the Bible itself, the first scripture.
Saint Augustine wrote,
"Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book…” At this point, a typical evangelical might say, “Yes, the Bible!” But Augustine describes this “book” as “the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead, He set before your eyes the things that He had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?”
Early Christians believed that understanding God was incomplete if one stopped at the Bible and the church.
They believed that revelation had an additional medium: the “book” of creation. It spoke of God’s character not through words, but through the dazzle of color, the sensuality of touch, and the resonance of sound.
The Cosmic Harmony
Medieval Christians believed that creation also sang God’s glory back to Him through music — a literal “music of the spheres,” a cosmic harmony resonating from the celestial bodies as they spun through the heavens.
And they weren’t being poetically delicate. They believed this music was real, even if imperceptible to hardened ears. It plays always and at all times, sublime beyond imagination.
However, as modernity set in, a rupture occurred in the human imagination. Enlightenment thinkers, in their attempts to dispel superstition, hollowed out creation of God’s sacred presence. The sun still shone, but not with the fire of divine radiance; trees still grew, but their branches no longer lifted praise.
Creation became a cold, hard machine, a closed system operating under impersonal physical laws. Meanwhile, the divine was exiled to a distant realm — the “man upstairs.”
Even modern Christians who insist that God is near often see the world through the lens of what critics have called the “disenchantment of the world.” We nod at verses like “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1), but take it as more of a poetic expression. We say, “In Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17), yet we move through our days as if things hold together all on their own. The heavens may still be singing, but we live like tone-deaf travelers in a universe of silence.
The Spiritual Senses
The Church Fathers taught that creation was a veil, yes, but a thin one — designed not to hide God, but to reveal Him. Nature’s details — its patterns, colors, fragrances, sounds — each contain some echo of the Logos, the Word through whom all things were made.
And though we may not hear the music of the spheres anymore, Scripture insists that the celestial song has not stopped, if only we have ears to hear and eyes to see:
"Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge… their voice goes out through all the earth" (Psalm 19:2–4). The psalmist is not speaking metaphorically here. He envisions a world alive with revelation — a cosmos where skies speak and stars testify.
Isaiah tells us that mountains break into song and trees clap their hands (Isaiah 55:12).
Jesus says that if we keep quiet, “the stones will cry out” (Luke 19:40).
In Romans 1, Paul writes that God’s invisible qualities — His eternal power and divine nature — have been “clearly seen” in what has been made. That means we were built to perceive His presence with the five senses.
At this very moment, you are being surrounded by the surround-sound and divine lyrics of cosmic worship.
He Was in the World… and the World Knew Him Not
More importantly, the Word that spoke galaxies into existence — the searing radiance behind all things — descended and entered the world of flesh. The glory of a million celestial supernovae took on a face we could touch, a voice we could hear, a body we could embrace.
But what did we see in Him?
"He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him" (Isaiah 53:2).
Our reality-distortion lens transformed God Himself into a threat.
And now, Bible in hand and radio tuned to Christian Station FM, we still don’t see Christ and crucify Him again every day as He reveals Himself in the quiet heartbeat of His wondrous world.
We choose bubbles of fear, bias, and over-familiarity, seeing only what we expect to see and nothing more.
The Hidden Face in the World
Where does this lead us? Not to pantheism — not to the idea that creation is God. But to the deeper mystery that creation is in God and God is in creation.
Every blade of grass is filled with God’s sustaining breath. The voice of the Beloved echoes from tree limbs to subway tracks to hospital beds. This world is not cold, dead matter. It is vibrating with God’s glorious life.
To sense this is to be drawn to want to connect with that something-more hovering all around, to touch the hem of Christ’s garment as it trails down to us from heaven in the here and now. Yeats once put it like this:
"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."
And where in all creation does God’s presence burn most intensely? Not a Pacific sunset, not Mount Everest, not the Grand Canyon: If God’s presence rings through the cosmos like a symphony, His crescendo is in the human face itself. Not just the innocent child’s or the devout saint’s face. But in the gaunt cheeks of the addict. In the face of that insidious right-winger or that odious left-winger. In the person who has hurt you and left the deepest scar on your soul.
And in your own reflection.
That glory is there — hidden yet blinding, waiting for the senses to grow sharp enough to behold the blaze.
