The Importance of Obscurity

I don't know anything more powerful than seeing your image reflected in your newborn child's eyes. It's terrifying and wonderful to think how much of an impact you will have on that little being and a reminder of how much of an impact you are having on other beings all the time. There is no stronger call to be a better father, mother, husband, wife, friend, co-worker, etc.

Moments of insight can be far too fleeting. They are here and gone. Like dew dried up by the rising sun. A meteor blazing through the heavens before winking out forever.

We rightfully cherish and value these moments. Crafting our life around their insights, but we do not value the moments of obscurity when our true purpose and mission seem lost. They are two sides of the same coin, yet we pray for one side and curse the other.

The words of Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher, reveal the critical nature of the lost times. "If there were no obscurity, man would not feel his corruption: if there were no light[,] man could not hope for a cure."

We should all look for higher truth, the footprints of the Creator upon the Universe, both in sacred texts, prayer, charity, love and through science. However, it is critical to remember that the lack of certainty is essential for faith. Hebrews 11:1 ("Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.").

Without faith, is is impossible to please God, "for anyone who approaches God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him." Hebrews 11:6.

Dr. Eben Alexander highlights the importance of the obscurity of the divine mission in his book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey Into the Afterlife. Dr. Alexander uses his training as a neurosurgeon and a near death experience to argue that one function of the brain may be to act as a cloak for a broader spiritual reality - allowing us to demonstrate our faith in this realm without concrete proof.


There would be no glory in serving God if the evidence of his grandeur was so clear that it was impossible not to. Just as there is little glory in swearing one's loyalty to math or science when it easy to prove that one and one always makes two or that the Earth circles around the Sun.

Jesus's statement to the Apostle Thomas illuminates the core value of obscurity in demonstrating faith. "Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed." John: 20:29.

While we cannot wait to live completely in the light. The importance of the occasionally overwhelming darkness can't be understated while we remain as John Steinbeck wrote - "East of Eden." (Referencing Genesis 4:16).



NOTE: I couldn't resist adding a full passage from Blaise Pascal's Pensees.


“Let them at least learn the nature of the religion they are attacking, before they attack it. If this religion boasted of having a clear vision of God, and of possessing Him plain and unveiled, then to say that nothing we see in the world reveals Him with this degree of clarity would indeed be to attack it. But it says, on the contrary, that man is in darkness and far from God, that He has hidden Himself from man’s knowledge, and that the name He has given Himself in the Scriptures is in fact The Hidden God (Is 45:15). Therefore if it seeks to establish these two facts: that God has in the church erected visible signs by which those who sincerely seek Him may recognize Him, and that he has nevertheless so concealed them that He will only be perceived by those who seek Him with all their hearts, what advantage can the attackers gain when, while admitting that they neglect to seek for the truth, they yet cry that nothing reveals it? For the very darkness in which they lie, and for which they blame the Church, establishes one of her two claims, without invalidating the other, and also, far from destroying her doctrine, confirms it” (Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 194).