The Veil: Between God’s Silence and Our Desire

God’s “hiddenness” isn't God’s absence. It’s the way a presence too near, too dense, must come to us under a veil.
The Curtain, Not the Void
Some previous thoughts press on a key point: heaven isn't “elsewhere” but “otherwise” – the hidden side of the real, pressing against us like a wall we’ve forgotten how to touch.
If that’s right, then the question “Why does God remain hidden?” is already slightly bent. It’s less, “Why does God stay away?” and more, “Why is God present in a way that doesn’t behave like obviousness?”
Think of that curtain image: you arrange your life as if the room ends at the fabric. Your ambitions, anxieties, even your theology lean against what you take for a wall. Only it isn’t the edge of things. It’s the seam.
“Hiddenness” then isn't an extra policy God adopts after creating the world. It’s built into the way God relates to creatures at all:
  • Near enough to sustain us,
  • Other enough not to collapse into us,
  • Loud enough to summon,
  • Quiet enough not to coerce.
God doesn’t hide like a fugitive avoiding discovery. God hides like a lover who refuses to reduce intimacy to surveillance.
Two Kinds of Hiddenness
There’s a doubleness here we have to honor.
On the one hand, there’s our hiding: we train ourselves not to see. We polish the glass of the aquarium and forget that water isn't all there is. We learn to treat the world as stuff, not sign—so of course the Sign-giver seems absent. A starved imagination calls the curtain a wall and then concludes there’s nothing beyond it.
On the other hand, there's a real divine reserve: God doesn’t force visibility. Even when God walks among us in a body, He'll ascend—withdraw from ordinary sight—and leave us with bread, wine, wounds, and witnesses rather than an endlessly available spectacle.
So: is God hidden because we're blind, or blind because God is hidden?
Both. And the “both” matters. If we say only “we're blind,” we turn everything into psychology and dodge the ache of unanswered prayers. If we say only “God hides,” we risk making divine love sound like a cruel game of cosmic peekaboo.
The truth is in the between: our refusal to see and God’s refusal to coerce meet at the same curtain.
Hiddenness as Mercy
Why would Love choose this kind of reserve?
Because a God who was as immediately obvious as gravity wouldn't be believed, but used. A God as empirically available as a light switch would be dragged into our projects, our wars, our metrics. We wouldn't adore; we'd deploy.
If God appeared with the blunt clarity we demand of data, God would be less hidden but more possessable—and therefore no longer God.
  • An idol is visible and manageable.
  • A living God is present and unmanageable.
So God’s hiddenness isn't stinginess but protection: of freedom, of love, of creaturely smallness. We're tiny. If the full radiance of the divine were exposed without mediation, it wouldn't feel like revelation but annihilation.
The wound is older than the weapon.
Before any particular trauma, there's the basic vulnerability of being finite before the Infinite. Hiddenness is how God’s glory goes gentle enough for our finitude to breathe.
Cloud on the mountain, dark speech in the heart, bread on the altar: the same mercy in different textures. Presence thickened, not withdrawn.
Hiddenness as Education in Love
There’s another reason: God wants friends, not spectators.
A world where God's real but not obvious trains desire. It lets longing ripen. It gives space for trust, for the slow work of attention, for that painful honesty when we realize: I don’t want merely answers; I want Someone.
This is why we should speak of liturgy, sacrament, prayer as “borderland practice,” rehearsal in realism, learning to live as though the curtain's thin.
God’s hiddenness isn't simply a test; it’s a pedagogy in how to love:
  • Love learns to recognize a voice without seeing a face.
  • Love learns the contours of presence in absence.
  • Love learns that miracle isn't the suspension of the real, but its disclosure.
We fear the abyss—but truer still, we fear being loved across it.
A too-obvious God would confirm our control; a hidden God keeps open the terrifying possibility that we're being pursued, addressed, wanted . . . in a way we can neither predict nor manage.
As Desmond would say: “One doesn't master the between. One keeps vigil there.” Hiddenness is the space of that vigil.
The Ascended Body and the Wound of History
The Ascension intensifies the question. If God once walked among us, healed our sick, touched our wounds—why leave? Why go behind the curtain again?
Because the aim was never to freeze one visible moment and make it permanent. The aim was to seed the whole of history with a new kind of nearness. If Christ’s body is now with the Father, then every “where” can become a place of encounter, but none of them on demand. The very same nearness that heals must respect the slow, terrible freedom of a world still capable of crucifixion.
So God’s hiddenness isn't a retreat from suffering; it’s a refusal to short-circuit history by abolishing freedom.
And yet . . . And yet—this must be said plainly—this doesn’t make the cry “Where were You?” go away. It doesn’t tidy the graves. Any account of hiddenness that erases that protest betrays the cross.
This isn't a puzzle to solve but a poverty to stay with.
A God who remains hidden in glory also remains hidden in agony: in the unvisited hospital room, the unanswered plea, the silence after the assault. If heaven and earth are meant to overlap, the first seam is in the wound.
We're not the origin of what we answer to.
But what we answer to has chosen to be entangled with our story—in all its horror and boredom—not hovering above it as a commentator.
Hiddenness as Promise, Not Alibi
In the end, “why does God choose to remain hidden?” can’t be answered like a policy FAQ. The hiddenness itself is part of the answer:
  • God hides to keep from becoming an idol.
  • God hides to safeguard freedom and love.
  • God hides to teach us to see the world as seam, not wall.
  • God hides in order to be found in ways that don’t erase our faces, our stories, our small yes.
But above all, God’s hiddenness is eschatological. It leans toward a future unveiling. The same tradition that speaks of God dwelling in “unapproachable light” also promises a day when “we shall see face to face.” The curtain isn't the final architecture of reality; it's a temporary mercy in a still-unfinished world.
So perhaps the better question is:
What kind of persons is God trying to form by remaining hidden like this—present enough to be trusted, withdrawn enough to be sought?
And if the world isn't empty but undisclosed, as Christians suggest, then every honest grief, every stubborn hope, every quiet act of fidelity is already a hand reaching for that curtain, feeling—maybe for the first time—that it moves.
The last word isn't, “God is hidden.”
The last word is: “God is hidden here.”

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