Deep Places

I’m sure it’s already a cliché of blogging and preaching—the Chilean miners rising from their tomb two thousand feet under a mountain—but who cares, it’s irresistible in a world dying for a breath of hope.


And more than this: it’s a page cut straight from the Christian culture of South America and of all those throughout the world who celebrate Easter. “Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life, that I should not go down to the Pit!” (Ps. 30:3) Who could deny that part of the thrill as each man came out of the beautiful escape capsule was its echoes of the Pascal Mystery? Because Christians say “Christ is Risen” the world had hoped that little bit more urgently, that little bit more fervently, that the thirty three miners would be saved.

But there is something even more important, more significant, than a brief media moment framed by the gospels. I used to teach a seminary student who was always talking about “thin spaces.” This person meant experiences where the normal mundane sense of the world was displaced by feelings of awe, beauty, holiness. Dead, harsh or oppressive elements of daily life were dispelled and something much more wonderful took their place.

I think, however, that “deep spaces” is a much better image. It is illustrated of course by the experience of the Chilean miners, but, beneath that, it is affirmed by the core New Testament trajectory of death, descent into the tomb and third day resurrection. John’s gospel breaks from the geometry of resurrection as an “up” movement: the passion and death of Jesus are in fact his “lifting up”. Then resurrection is simply the life-filled affirmation of that amazing, counter-intuitive “up”. And, afterward, when Jesus’ brothers and sisters learn the God-revealing meaning of all this Jesus does “ascend”, i.e. all spaces in the universe are filled with his amazing new geometry of descent.

Deep spaces are unmade space, space not controlled by the violent meanings of the world. They may be the result of violence—perhaps they always are—but those suffering in them/from them do not share the world’s meaning: rather they endure it and from the depths of their souls they cry out against it. Deep spaces are therefore the place of emptiness, of possibility, of what yet can be. They are the space of creation and re-creation.

Consequently they are the space of great love and joy. This last weekend I spent time in a monastery in southern New York. It was classic fall weather— that peculiar dry and bright intensity when all the colors of life crackle in chorus before they must turn to dust. The monastery is located high upon weathered mountains which shoulder up clouds then sweep down abruptly into carved-out stream and river valleys. There is a path at back of the monastery which leads down just such a canyon, down to the river Chemung five hundred feet below. Near the head of the path, on a wall by the last of the buildings, one of the brothers had placed a crucifix with the Christ made out of wrapped wire, like the coils of several electric motors strung together. There was something about the harshness of the medium and the way the artist made the corpus sunk entirely in death, with the knee jutting out almost at right angles. It captured the total imprisonment of the body and the fact that the only movement left for a crucified man was spiritual: either total hatred, total despair, or a total self-giving of love. Needless to say what the image captured was the last. Thus suddenly it was entirely right that the body should resemble electric coils, for it was this love that made the electrons run in the first place, across all the channels of the universe. And the crook of the knee projecting out into the void signaled the great wooded chasm below and it became filled with God’s love in a totally real and concrete sense.

This was not a thin space, suggesting a parallel, better and spiritual world. This was a deep space, the depths of this world changed and changing into what it was always meant to be. Deep spaces may not be easy. They can be filled with trauma and the imminent threat of death. But as shaped by the Crucified they are haunted endlessly by love and contain an indelible promise of life. I wasn’t thinking at all of Chile, just about the wooded canyon, about electricity, and about the mystery of love . It was only later I thought about the Chilean miners, and about all the TV stations and the Internet, their electricity buzzing with resurrection in the depths.