Gusher in the Gulf

I’m thinking there’s a metaphor here, and a many-sided one. Oil is spewing forth and nothing can really stop it. It’s too deep, too pressurized, too violent. The whole six hundred thousand square miles of sun-kissed Gulf is under threat and with that the Atlantic coast and who knows what else. Our human world is suffering a man-made eruption of subterranean filth into the biosphere, and it becomes an instant image of the upwelling of violent human desire into the human world, happening on an unprecedented scale, and no one can do anything to stop it.


When I first heard about the BP drilling catastrophe I was struck by the given name of the rig where it literally all went down: Deepwater Horizon. Down there, five thousand feet down, that was their horizon, that’s where their vision was. Most people don’t look anywhere near that deep, but BP did, Haliburton did. They’re tapping into the abyss, the place where in biblical cosmology monsters dwell and now those monsters are marching upward and onward toward the land, just like the book of Daniel saw it. These giant companies are driven by ruthless ambition and lust for profit and they are mobilizing forces of catastrophic proportions. But their abyssal vision after all is only a concentration and a focus of something we all share unconsciously, and across the whole face of the earth. It is the thing inside all of us that pushed them progressively to deeper and deeper levels of sea and land. They couldn’t have done what they did unless they were urged along by the universal human demand for objects of desire welling up from our collective human depths. BP didn’t make the gusher. We did.

But this terrible truth, while crucial, is not the final term of the metaphor. The amazing thing about the gospels is that there is nothing about the way human beings work which cannot be redeemed, and in fact already has. Jesus said the sign that he would give was the sign of Jonah: that is, of the prophet who was swallowed by a monster of the deep, and then that very same monster spewed him forth on the land as a prophetic sign of a final end to violence and killing in Nineveh—in other words a striking prophetic vision of conversion and resurrection. In the meantime, yes, after two thousand years of Christianity, human culture has gotten hold of a derivative and destructive notion of life freed from all restraints. Westerners have taken the shell of Christianity and made an ideology of limitless freedom exemplified by the once-macho-now-pathetic mantra of “Drill, baby, drill!” They took the demythologizing force of the cross—freeing the world from fear of all gods and monsters—and made it a divinely-given right to drill and grab, steal and deal, shoot and bomb as and when they wanted. They took the mother-of-pearl shell but discarded the wondrous oyster within, the truth of infinite self-giving love. And now all the oysters are dying.

And yet it is not too late. We are now fully in apocalyptic times and apocalyptic thinking and choices are required. Deeper than the gusher of desire lies the gusher of grace.The flood of oleaginous desire covering the earth could not be there unless the living water of grace had set it in motion in the first place. We have much preferred the murky pleasures of oil to the transparency of water, but now we are being brought to see that the first leads to death and is after all only a dumb short-circuiting of the second. It is in fact only a very short human journey, a simple anthropological twist, to bring us from outrageous desire to outlandish love. The deep source is the same—the infinite self-giving of Christ. In the deepest sense it is not we who made the gusher, Christ did, but a choice is built in to that distinction. It is a matter of going that little bit deeper to encounter the bottomless well of love at the core of all contemporary desire.

This short journey also demands what seems like a death-defying leap. It seems like everything that is meaningful for us, everything pleasurable, is going to die. But now—and here’s the really apocalyptic part—all the images on T.V. and internet tell us that it is dying anyway. All humanity has to do is understand the true character of its situation, understand that the real gusher in the gulf is the Jesus who was Jonah, the one who humanized all monsters, and in every sense. Jesus is the one who changed the co-ordinates of being human, making it possible to release the well-spring of human desire so that it one day have the true possibility of becoming the living fountain of love.

Sound like a tall order? Just turn the T.V. back on and check out the choices we have left. And in the meantime as Christians it’s really not our business to second-guess what the rest of humanity will do. The one thing required of us is to be completely faithful to the sign of Jesus in our times, the deepwater horizon of our world.

Tony