Tuesday, December 30, 2008

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.

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