Tenebra Divina: Our Third Garden #7thDay

I often think about Eden—not just as the beginning, but as something we were meant to carry within us. There, in the cool of the day, God walked with humanity. But something broke. We chose autonomy over communion, and shame entered. That first garden was lost because we hid. And since then, something in us has always longed to return.

Then there’s Gethsemane. Jesus didn’t hide. He knelt, face to the ground, and wrestled openly with the will of the Father. It wasn’t a place of clarity or comfort. It was a place of agony, of surrender. Yet unlike Adam, He didn't run. That garden was not lost—it became the passage to redemption.

And now, I realize we have our own garden. A third garden. It’s not literal. It’s interior. It’s dark—not because God is absent, but because He is present in a way that’s hard to describe. This is what the mystics called Tenebra Divina—Divine Darkness.

For a long time, I thought darkness meant failure or sin. But this is something different. It’s not darkness from turning away from God, but from being drawn deeper into Him. It's the kind of darkness that disorients my senses but awakens my spirit. It strips away the false lights I relied on. It doesn’t offer explanations—it offers presence.

I’m beginning to understand that God sometimes hides not to punish, but to purify. To move me from knowing about Him to actually knowing Him. In this place, I don’t have answers, and I’ve stopped pretending I need them. What I need is to remain. To wait. To trust. Like a chrysalis in the dark—enclosed, unformed, yet slowly being made into something new.

This third garden isn’t easy. It exposes my fears. My illusions about God. My tendency to perform, to manage, to stay in control. But I’m learning that it’s okay to not know, to not see clearly. Because faith grows here. Not in the light, but in the soil of hiddenness. And like the chrysalis, the stillness is not stagnation—it’s sacred transformation.

Tenebra Divina is not the end. It’s the middle. The in-between where God makes us real. Where surrender becomes transformation. Where we stop demanding God on our terms and start receiving Him on His. This garden is mine. It’s ours. And though it doesn’t feel like home yet, I believe it’s leading us there. Like the chrysalis in the dark, unseen but becoming—this too is how resurrection begins.