The Abyss is a Well of Light

I recently had to take myself to the ER: just a scare, nothing wrong at all. But being there with a dozen electrodes stuck to your body certainly concentrates the mind. It serves also to create a personal parable. What signals are you really sending? What truly is in your heart? It made me think one more time about the abyss and something about it that I have not said clearly enough and I really should.

I think I’ve always been attracted to deep places, to caves, pits, ocean depths. Not for any dark psychological reason, but because I felt truth was likely hidden away in the deep recesses of the world, kept from plain view. What happens, however, when the metaphysical distinction between these places and the places of height, purity and clarity begins to break down? What happens when the attention of the world is drawn to those fearful spaces, to Abu Grahib as much as to Capitol Hill? Surely the world is being drawn into the abyss?

And we know the reason why that is the case. It is because Christ voluntarily went to this place in fulfillment of forgiving love. So far the effect on the world is not so much forgiving love as an opportunity for anger when all those dark places are brought to light. This is understandable in terms of the old world (the word Nietzsche gave to it was ressentiment/resentment) but it is not the truth of the gospel. The exposure of the abyss in terms of anger and revenge is a half-measure of the gospel in the world, the maximum distance that we’re prepared to go while we hang on to our violent human structure and response. But the fact is it would be impossible to bring the abyss to light if God-in-Christ had not gone there in absolute nonviolence and forgiveness. One hint of retaliation down there and the whole place folds over on itself in violence and unforgiveness, until the last man standing gets to be god. That is the story of Zeus and the Titans. He fought the monsters and locked them up in a pit and then went off to live happily in Olympus. But Christ, though risen from the dead, remains the crucified, and so in a world under the impact of the gospel the abyss remains clearly in our sight, continually in the range of human geography. What we don’t yet see so clearly, what we don’t “get,” is this absolute love of Christ in the abyss, a love without remainder, which makes the revelation possible in the first place.

Another way into what I’m saying is that Jesus did not go to the abyss on a “mission” like Bruce Willis destroying the giant meteor in Armageddon. He didn’t go down there to do something dangerous and then get the heck out. He went there to be something and remain. He committed himself absolutely to that space so that it will end by being radically transformed.

This then is the secret: at the heart of the abyss there is the constant enduring light of absolute love and life. In Christ the abyss becomes a well of light, it becomes heaven itself, the very space of God like to none other. It is the New Jerusalem come down out of heaven, a bride adorned for her husband.

For me this is the truth that the churches have yet to wake up to: that this earth is already the contemplative and redemptive space. There is no other, and we can and must already dwell in this truth, prayerfully, ecstatically, transformatively. The reason why the tradition has not seen this is because it has known the earth as abyss, but with a Greek heaven in view it has said “bad, bad, bad” to the earth. It has displaced the transformation to an other-worldly space and banked the currency needed to get there. (See Augustine’s famous passage in the City of God describing human life as hell-on-earth and a consequent expectation of heaven as release. In this respect the modern abyss-as-anger is a real step forward from the old Christian dualism; at least it assumes ownership of the abyss.)

My dream is that one day there will be a new Christian architecture as evident and recognizable as the painfully boring gothic that in one form or another dots every Western landscape. Instead of providing spires that reach up to the sky it will show forth a communal shape where people live and pray in union with God-in-the-abyss, a place of peace, of love, of light, of sustainable work, of harmony with the land, of endless circles of life, death and life-again. These new constructions will say plainly that the people there are not going any other place than where they are, pouring themselves out continually into the present moment of love and life already realized by God-in-the-abyss. The only thing they await is the final connection of all these spaces, when the life to which they give themselves will join with all other spaces of life and fuse into pure light. They await the time when visibly and irreversibly the universe will become its own pure well of light.

The A-Word

Anyone who has heard me present or has read some things I have written knows that I use the word “abyss.” Numerous authors make use of this term, and it doesn’t matter whether they are religious, philosophical or literary, they never bother to define it as far as I can see. In a way they don’t have to. The word carries an immediate resonance we all seem to know about. I came across this the other day. It’s from an interview with Roberto Bolaño, author of the apocalyptically mind-blowing book, "2666."

“While we search for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, the new, that can only be formed in the unknown, we must continue to turn to sex, books and travel, even knowing they lead us into the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where we can find the cure.”

The A-word gives us not just a strong metaphor, a poetic device with literary effects. It is more and more an anthropological event, a real place made out of humanity’s real existence, an experience, a progressively more powerful fact. It’s where we’re heading as a planet, where all gods are dead and new ones cannot be born. It’s the wreckage of the physical and religious environment. It is the melting of the icecaps, the flooding of small islands, the extinction of species, and at the same time it’s Jurassic Park, the dream of resurrecting Dinosaurs, the Mammoths, anything enormous and transcendentally violent. It’s humanity left to its own devices, casting around desperately for something big and powerful enough to hold us all in awe before it’s too late.

That used to be the job of God: keeping us in line, while destroying our enemies for us. But now we’re so aware of other people’s gods doing that for them, and the negative effects that has in the world, that many people jettison God completely. This is largely the motivation behind what’s called the “new atheism,” subsequent to the old philosophical or scientific atheism (while sometimes using the same arguments). It’s also come on top of a half century of having our cake and eating it: holding onto the role of God in public life, and for the sake of an afterlife, but every single human day living sky-high as consumers, with the next car or T.V. as the only things really worth caring about...

Thus God in many people’s minds is either a bully or a sick colluder, and in any case a has-been, and so we’re both dealing with a super-stressed planet and watching God exit from the back door of history joining all the other refugees of history on the road to nowhere. But, then suddenly, isn’t that the point? God does not control us anymore. God as the Father/Mother is a refugee, packing her bag the same as the rest of us for a journey to the unknown, to the new. God is alienated from the world, but that’s OK because all the rest of us are too. The current historic exile of God is precisely the way to meet and know God, as hand-in-hand we make our way to the unimaginably new. Isn’t that perhaps the plan of God all along, and God-self has been waiting out at the crossroads of history for God-knows how long. Because if God is truly “other””—and that for me means unimaginably nonviolently dynamic, i.e. loving—then all our all-too-human constructions have to break down before we have a chance truly to encounter God.

But meanwhile—and here’s the thing that really does me in—the churches fight a ridiculous rear-guard action to keep God back at home, or at least on the mountaintop we can see from our back yard. To keep him in church! They try to insist God is in charge, there on a Sunday morning between the four stain-glassed walls, and so permanently in a piece of our imagination that needs him like that. Check it out. The next time you go to church the minister will say some one of the following: God remains in charge because all roads lead to God, because all religions say the same thing, because God lives in heaven and will bring us there in the end, or because God is just and will come one day to establish justice and he’s biding his time right now, or because he in fact will intervene right now only for me, plus some other me's, to make all the me's successful while everyone else can literally go to the devil, etc. etc. Perhaps there is a sense in which some of this is true—I am sure that anyone given to metaphysical thinking can find ways to argue the case, as no categories are more elastic than metaphysical ones. But what is missing in it all is the very thing metaphysics can never supply: the critical sense of the human condition, the fearful moment of the planet that we are in, the way the human crisis bears down on all of us more and more each day amid each new manifestation of global malaise and unrest. What is missing precisely is human sense, the anthropological truth, the six days of the week apart from the metaphysical sunday sabbath, and the way God is now to be found there, in the human, and only there. What is missing is the abyss.

Jesus has always led us into the abyss. He said “The only sign that will be given you is the sign of Jonah,” and he meant it. When he also said “My God, why have you abandoned me?” that means in the last analysis that God also has been abandoned—God-self is lonely, isolated, dying—otherwise it was not in fact “God” who “became man.” No, the image of Jesus hanging on the cross has slowly eaten into all images of an infinitely powerful, impassive, vengeful deity and at root is the most provocative source of the current exile of God—continually weakening God so that many people who think violence is the only strength identifiable with the thought of God no longer take this (crucified) God seriously. But, really, it is the weakness of the cross which is its long-term, enduring, immense and transformative strength. So, then, the abyss is the necessary Christian destination, and the churches really need to wake up to this historic destiny. I could say more, if only because I feel I can never express this adequately or clearly enough, but I will just ask you to think on the quote from Bolaño again, this time amended in a way he would surely nor recognize but I think still works (and with apologies to the dead!)

While we search for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, the new, that can only be formed in the unknown, we must continue to turn to Jesus, even knowing he leads us into the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where we can find the cure.

The abyss is a concrete reality which is a mystery, a secret, but it’s there, and less and less of a secret because Jesus is walking around in it. Sunday services which reference God outside of this become progressively a falsification, not just an evasion.

Small Is Getting Bigger

I just got back from, Toronto and a weekend with a group of about forty Baptists called “The Gathering.” They first came together twenty years ago as a protest and alternative voice in face of the hijacking of McMaster Divinity College by a dogmatic theological perspective and administration. It was a joy to be with them.

They have sustained over the years and in the process have built an experience of dwelling and journeying together on the margins of power and privilege. They are an “Abrahamic minority,” one of those small groups through which God’s world-overturning purpose is served.

The great plus of being a small Christian group is that it’s possible to operate in an immediacy of love, littleness and forgiveness that big structures make so difficult. There is perhaps a spiritual law that the less you have in terms of power relations and status the more the new way of being human desired by God may be experienced. It’s an air or breath of freedom which it’s possible to breathe at these “little” levels, but much more difficult to find in the office complexes and complex offices of big organization.

My dream is that one day the church will consist entirely of such minorities, linked without hierarchy, but by word and by love.

The election was never far away. Its consequences for the whole world are acutely felt outside the USA, rather than the tit-for-tat of plumbers and polls that dominates inside it. Here is another, this time political (and in many ways peculiarly Canadian), sense of powerlessness, but, also again, a sheer hope and trust that a new human way will finally emerge the winner.

I presented on what might be called “archaeology of the cross,” going back through the layers of what the cross has meant over the long course of Christian history. From a symbol of victory, to an icon of divine violence, to a body of human pain, to an abyss of compassion. The image of the cross is a barometer or mirror of our most crucial humanity, struggling with itself as the Shepherd seeks to lead it out into a new creation.

So, go “Gathering”! Greetings from Wood Hath Hope and, for what it’s worth, I think you’re on the way!

Tony

The Scandal of Death (or the Death of Scandal)

I recently got back from a theology conference in San Francisco organized by Michael Hardin and Preaching Peace. Kudos to Michael. Great papers, and the inspiring presence of René Girard! (But I’m also sorry I just got round to talking about this. Linda’s in England, attending to her very seriously ill father, so things are a bit out of kilter. Please pray for her Dad, Peter. He doesn’t have long.)

I’ve been thinking about the conference off and on ever since I got back. You fly across the continent to hear the condensed insights of outstanding scholars, and in areas that are of central interest for you. It’s impossible not to be processing so much of it. One of the papers was by a philosopher who also considers himself a bit of a theologian. I could say perhaps I’m the converse of that, a theologian who also considers himself a bit of a philosopher. So we have a lot in common, except coming at it from opposite directions! What this scholar was talking about was Resurrection, and I was reminded of how the philosophers in Athens reacted to Paul when he spoke on that topic, about the “resurrection of the dead:” some scoffed, others wanted to hear more. (In Acts, chap. 17).

My opposite-direction colleague’s argument was that you really can’t have resurrection and remain a creature of flesh because the character of flesh is just precisely its mortality, its corruptibility. The only other way is to talk about two worlds, a second world of “spirit” separate from this one where we can be “beamed up,” and this is a dualism which we’re all trying to get away from (certainly all those at the conference.) So the honest and truthful thing is to accept real death and forget fanciful notions of resurrection.

First off, the New Testament is already aware of this issue. Paul uses the word “flesh” to stand for a whole complex of reality, both bio-physical and relational. Flesh is the human (anthropological) system predicated on death, working through a desire that knows nothing else but death, and that’s why it produces continual mayhem (Gal. 5.19-21; note how relationships of violence outnumber traditional sexual sins “of the flesh” at least two to one). But Paul also has the concept of “body” and this in fact overlaps with flesh precisely where he’s talking about resurrection (e.g. 1 Cor.15. 39-41). So he expresses a radical continuity with embodied existence occurring in the resurrection. However, it is the Gospel of John which fixes the value of flesh in the New Testament: Jesus is the Word “made flesh” and he gives us his flesh to eat as communication of endless life. In other words, in John flesh is transformed through Jesus, not done away with.

The problem for philosophy is that it finds it extremely difficult to recognize the dramatically new thing that Jesus has brought into the world, and I mean into. For philosophy there is really nothing new under the sun. On the other hand actual philosophers do have some inkling of it, otherwise why would you have a philosopher speaking at a theological conference? Actual philosophers are smart enough to know that the game has been changed by Jesus, yet they’re always trying to say the change is not actual but in fact has been always and ever the same game. That way they have the final word!

Death, however, is the tripping point where things either are indeed as they have always been—death the absolute and universal leveler, or where, through Jesus, something genuinely, impossibly new makes itself known. In other words death is a scandal, which can overwhelm us or which, through Jesus, we can overcome. Now I have no idea what makes resurrection happen, how much it is a miracle of God in the cosmos, how much the product of human attitude and transformation. I feel likely it is both, mixed up so deeply, to a point where we can’t tell one from the other. What I do know is that the raw vibrancy of the Risen One has so permeated our world that philosophers are drawn to theological conferences, that movies feature the theme of Jesus’ nonretaliation on a regular basis, that a meal in the food court of a Mall can turn into a Eucharistic thanksgiving quicker than a heartbeat. And that forgiveness of our enemies has become a contemporary question and dangerous political possibility. If death had the final word with Jesus all of this would be unthinkable, literally beyond our anthropological ken.

My thoughts are with Linda and Peter…these thoughts, of the Risen One standing at the door of death.

Overflowing Cup

I entered the novitiate of a religious order when I was in my seventeenth year. I stayed for another twenty. The nerve of my youth I gave to a contingent set-up claiming the name of Christ. It was written in my genetic and cultural code that I would do this, a perfect storm of my own most profound senses and the particular formation that only a wounded human being who happens to be your mother can give. Life saved me. It popped the rivets of my world. It was like sitting down at a desk, and the whole thing, desk and chair, collapsing underneath you. There were no two pieces left together. The only reasonable thing was to walk away.

I then became the director of a homeless shelter in London’s East End. After that I came to America and did a Ph.D.

Where was God? I thought she was in the religious life and the priesthood, but no, not there. I looked for her among the homeless, but she moved on. I sought her in thought, and only found scratches on a desert sand. The Divine Lover is dark and mysterious. She is never missing but rarely seen. It’s like trying to catch sunlight in a cup. The moment you take it inside the sunshine’s gone. Or play the shell game with the Spirit. If you say she’s under that shell and lift it up, she’s gone!

God has disappeared from every closed system I was ever in, ecclesiastic, social service, academic. But like a deer in your back yard if you’re quiet and patient she’ll turn up. Shaking morning dewdrops from her flanks. Or a sometime walk on the beach: lo, every shell is filled with God!

But it’s not simply a matter of God being elusive, a willow-the-wisp, in some happy mystical sense. It’s that God is actively popping the seams of all the closed systems, in Christ. That’s the point. I haven’t gone on this wacky pilgrimage across the face of the world just to come up with a reheated Hinduism.

All our systems are sick with violence and Jesus is in the slow but relentless process of breaking them down, so, yes, they can be open to the infinite Spirit. A broken cup in the sunshine has a beauty all its own.

Today I think I’ll go out and find a shard of some pot or cup. It’ll be a sacrament for me.

Tony

Forms of Love

Yesterday we were at Green Lakes, one of the prettiest of parks in Upstate New York. Neighbors on our street were holding a birthday bash. Tom is lucky enough to have been born in late summer so he can throw a party at picnic tables next to open water with a sandy beach and swimming safe for kids. Every year. Yesterday was pitch-perfect August. Hazy warm sun and a steady breeze off the water; it felt a continuous caress. The lakes were formed at the end of the last ice age, fifteen thousand years ago a melting glacier gouging two enormously deep basins in the earth. Then all these years later we sit around and talk, marriage and politics, work and friends, books and TV. In the middle there is the usual lost child, the scary announcement followed by mass exodus from the bathing area. Then after a tense minute or so a glad reunion somewhere and permission to re-enter the water. Meanwhile the breeze continues to play on shoulders and backs, arms and legs, an enormously generous lover.

Paul in the New Testament tells us that the form of this world is passing away. But that’s so it can be replaced by another. It took thousands and thousands of years of geology to produce the form of Green Lakes. And all the weather that’s ever been, the sun, the air, the water, to spring that delightful wind off the lake into our faces. But human time is quicker than geological and climate time, especially lately. We’ve sped things up considerably. It is logical then to believe that Paul’s prediction is being fulfilled even as we speak. As we sat around at Green Lakes yesterday we enjoyed a particular form of the earth that had been prepared for us over eons and we were largely unconscious of its huge labor as we enjoyed its blessing. The form of the cross—its forgiveness, compassion and nonviolence—is growing in the world every day of our lives, and the job of contemporary Christians is to understand what that means and proclaim it. It’s nothing to do with that old tired, wretched business transaction between the sacrificial victim Jesus and God, paying the divinity off in a manner worthy of the most awful underworld (o.k paesan, kill my only son for his assets, and I’ll consider us quits!). No, it’s the infinite wisdom of the Eternal Lover translating the violent form of humanity into something almost inconceivable but which we know by the names of peace and love.

Incidentally, there were quite a few Wood Hath Hopers there at Green Lakes enjoying the sunshine. Heather, Dana, Linda and me at the party. And as I was heading home I saw Sue and John there too.

Virtual Truth

The website will be going live in the next couple of days, and I'm very excited. In the meantime I can write some more. I am so happy about the site. Our Web designer did a great job. A site is a virtual world, but we humans are all virtual anyway. When we wake up we decide what clothes to wear or the first words we'll say that day. It's basically a virtual me, a version or design of myself just for now and for today. We're always making up who we're going to be.

Jesus did the biggest virtual design ever: he said the kingdom of God is close, so get ready! A kingdom is supposed to arrive with big thumping armies and crushing power. Jesus didn't try to force "reality" like that. He said it will happen if you act like it. Or like Alcholics Anonymous say, "fake it until you make it." That's the only way to make a nonviolent world arrive, by acting "as if" it's already here. Despite all contrary evidence. The Cruxifixion is the biggest virtuality imaginable. Acting as if forgiveness and life are possible in the middle of the most acute violence. But then this virtuality became an even greater virtuality: Resurrection. Only a few disciples saw it, believed it, got it... It was not like it was plastered over the front page of the Jerusalem Times or the Roman Telegraph. But then--the most amazing thing--these people started also acting "as if."

So finally today, all these centuries later, we're really getting down to really serious as iffing...

Tony

First From WoodHathHope

This is a hello! A first post for the website that's coming up shortly. You may get this as a past post, or something. Anyway it's the first. Thousands of people have blogs, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. Why read this one? Because in some way you're in community with Wood Hath Hope. Probably you're local and have attended WHH meetings. On the other hand because of the WWW you might be on the other side of the world and reading about WHH. In which case you and me and others are connected in this strange worldwide electronic community.

Does that mean I/we love you? Yes, if the love I and others in WHH have for those physically proximate us is real. Then you will share in that. Love is indivisible in the world.

Tony