This is from Ralph Milton who writes an on-line newsletter called Rumors.

Absolute darkness. I’ve only experienced it a few times. Most recently in the Kartchner Caverns in Arizona. At one point along the tour through those magnificent caves, the guides turns off all the lights. And the group just stands there. In total darkness. Your eyes strain for any scrap of light.
And it’s scary. Because we almost never experience total darkness and when it happens it touches some deep and unexplored anxiety.
The same is true of absolute silence. I’ve only experienced that in specialized recording studios designed to deaden all sound. If you stay there in the studio all by yourself it also becomes frightening. Your ears strain for a sound, to the point where you can hear your own heart beating.
Total darkness – total silence – is alien to most of us. I asked a totally blind friend once, what it was like to have total darkness and he began to talk about his hands and his ears doing the seeing for him. Helen Keller, who was both blind and deaf, talked about the moment she made a connection between her sense of touch and a world out there.
So when we read, “In the beginning . . .” we find ourselves asking what was there before the beginning. Which is a dumb question because if it was the beginning there was nothing there before that. Not even time. Not even place. But it’s almost impossible to imagine that.
It’s almost impossible to imagine a God who exists outside the boundaries of space and time and place. In fact, I think it’s impossible, because as soon as we try to imagine God, we immediately use categories that are part of our human experience – a something – a being that exists somehow.
It’s not just that we run out of words. We run out of imagination.
Scientists talk about the big bang – an expansion into time and space that began with – what? Well, nothing.
Scientists can no more talk about or imagine what was there before there was anything, than we can. We move from science into mystery.
So those opening words of the Bible come to our rescue. “In the beginning, God . . .”
And it would be good not to add anything to those words for awhile, because as soon as we do, we put God into categories and concepts of our own making.