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.