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The Luminous Dusk
Finding God in Deep, Still Places
By Dale C. Allison, Jr.
Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006, 178 pages.
Reviewed by Kathleen L. Housley
If religion begins with wonder, then religion dies when wonder is lost. That is the central tenet in The Luminous Dusk: Finding God in Deep, Still Places by Dale C. Allison, Jr. Allison feels, and fears, that because so many people live in cities and suburbs separated from nature, they are no longer in touch with the awe that inspired their forebears. To him, the omnipresent light of the cities has resulted in “the retreat of the stars,” with the consequence that people are less inclined to believe.
Early on, Allison makes the point that virtually all of the significant events in the life of Jesus took place outdoors, including his baptism, temptation, transfiguration, and crucifixion. How, Allison asks, can modern readers relate to the agricultural parables when they don’t know about planting and harvesting? How can they understand the reference to the birds of the air when they can’t tell a sparrow from a starling?
Allison is Errett M. Grable Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Not surprisingly, he draws on the early Christian fathers for some of his arguments including Augustine, but he also quotes twentieth-century writers including Kafka. He is as likely to draw an example from a baseball game as from a medieval mystical tradition.
The book starts with a clear example of the type of disjunctive thinking that develops when humans are disconnected from nature—that of the city dweller who has never seen a live chicken, let alone watched one be killed, although she eats it for dinner. Because the only animal with which the city dweller may have personal contact is a friendly pet, it follows that animals are companions, hence they have rights. Allison is not trying to support or refute arguments for animal rights. His point is that “our convictions, however much they may be thought of as the conclusions of argument, are often heavily indebted to environmental factors we fail to perceive because we are too close to them.”
Allison then discusses various forms of loss, including the ubiquity of noise and the loss of silence, the ubiquity of light and the loss of darkness, and the ubiquity of possessions and the loss of asceticism. What concerns him is that these losses strike at the heart of faith: God is silent, chooses to “dwell in thick darkness” (1 Kings 8:12), and calls his people away from materialism.
While Allison investigates the problems well, he is weaker in offering suggestions and occasionally lapses into cynicism. Ultimately, he urges readers to be truthful with themselves as to the nature of prayer. To him, prayer is not a means to get things or to make things happen. Instead, it is the creation of an inner stillness where a dialogue with God can occur, with eyes closed in the luminous dusk, “the unspent dark cloud of God’s glory.”
Kathleen L. Housley’s book of poetry, Firmament, will be published by Higganum Hill Books in 2007.
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