Smith discloses that in his early forties he entered a season of dark depression, precisely when he was working on the Cultural Liturgies project. Smith opens up with vulnerability, admitting that only in early adulthood did he begin to unpack the implications of being abandoned by his father at age eleven. Simultaneously, as Smith encountered philosophy in his late teens and early twenties, he had become hungry for knowledge. Imagining uncertainty as a kind of “land of possible knowledge,” he wanted to conquer it, and was confident that, through philosophy, he could. Slowly, however, he recognized this posture toward philosophy as a kind of defense mechanism, especially against fear and pain. He began to see much of contemporary philosophy as a misguided attempt to “think our way” out of humanity’s messes. Again, for a reader of the Cultural Liturgies series, this much sounds familiar.

Nevertheless, in these earlier works on communal worship Smith suggests, if not a pathway to certainty, a reliable roadmap to orient oneself toward the Kingdom of God. While Smith leaves plenty of room for mystery there, one still finishes these books thinking, “There may not be a perfect approach to theological certainty, but at least Christian worship can reliably orient me toward love of God and neighbor.” Again, Smith never says it quite like this. But to a reader of Smith’s earlier work, it’s clear that Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark charts a completely different course—a course where courses disintegrate, a journey that undoes cartography. Or as Smith says in the introduction, “What happens when the light goes out and the world goes dark? . . . This book is a testament to the failure of philosophy as I knew it.” The uncertainty he describes is less intellectual and more experiential: “What’s happening to me?” he recalls wondering in bewilderment; it was obvious to him that philosophy as he knew it couldn’t answer this question, and nothing else in his experience could either.

Instead he was consoled by the journeys recounted in the works of Christian mystical contemplatives like Meister Eckhart, St. Teresa of Ávila, St. John of the Cross, and the anonymous fourteenth-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing. They became his “phenomenologists of the dark.” Their works made him aware of alternative pathways through the dark; poets, painters, composers, and filmmakers opened the gate that gave him the capacity to personally walk on the paths they’d trodden.

As Smith describes the journey, his account of his own trauma and pain is unsettling, even troubling. Yet there’s also something inviting about the way he sets up the journey from solitude, through stillness, to unknowing, and wonder. In the early chapters, Smith aptly describes our contemporary “distraction industrial complex,” especially occasioned by smartphones. But he also carefully describes the need in the quest for solitude not only to escape external distraction, but to conquer the myriad appetites and distractions of the inner life that threaten to follow us wherever we go, offering false balm for our pain and fear. For him, visual art, film, and music proved impactful in helping him quiet the noise within and without to experience true solitude and silence.

As Smith describes it, unknowing can be scary. I felt my pulse quicken as Smith suggested that genuine mysticism “ruins your life.” He describes this process in several ways, none of which sound pleasant. The generative womb of solitude becomes a grave of unknowing. The reader is cautioned to expect a kind of humiliation, annihilation, vexation, and death. As I read I noticed my jaw clenched, all the muscles in my face tight. “I offer no apologia for the mystical option,” he writes. “But that doesn’t mean that the mystics are wrong. I have dangled at the end of that rope . . . You could probably say I gave up. Maybe the gentle mystics would say I let go. What I didn’t realize is that I was learning something.”

That “something” Smith goes on to describe as the mystics’ refusal of self-grounding that culminates in a deep experience of utter dependence on a giver. Moreover, Smith points out, the mystics consistently characterize this giver as loving, even as Love. This experience of profound love that can’t be made sense of paves the way for wonder, and opens up new worlds of communion—with God, and with other human beings and all of creation. If my face had tightened in response to Smith’s account of knowing, as I read Smith’s account of utter dependence, my face finally let go. It was as if my body could sense Smith’s invitation to himself: stop trying to control the world and others through knowledge; assume a more receptive posture; attend to the Love already in your midst. This is what Smith calls wonder.

As a whole, I found Smith’s account refreshing and hopeful, especially as an invitation to sit more deeply in my own experiences of suffering and uncertainty, personal and professional. I heard in the book Smith’s permission to resist the urge to constantly distract myself from personal pain—permission to trust that, if I’m stuck on something, there’s probably more to learn there. Likewise, Smith’s account offered me a deeper kind of assurance that my absence of words in a hospital room says nothing about an absence of God among the beeping monitors and antiseptic smells. Quite the opposite—the silences I share with my parishioners in those rooms become profound occasions for attention to the love of God in our midst. Sometimes uncertainty in the face of suffering is not a problem to be solved or even a decision tree to analyze my way through—it’s a dark room I might just need to sit in for a little longer, making my home, with God and others, in this luminous dark.