Abysses
Introduction
I was first caught by this
concept, "abysses", while I was reading Leanne Payne's Restoring the
Christian Soul. She wrote about the abyss of nonbeing—the root cause of
all existential anxiety, that ever-feared and ever-present spectre of the
possibility of the complete and utter negation of the human soul. Then I
began to notice the use of the same word in the writings of other authors.
From ancient days, through the middle ages to the present, counselors and
sages have been using this concept: the image of the chasmic void—the
infinitely deep and wide abyss to describe spiritual and psychological
realities. Even in the beginning, or
infinitely close to the beginning (the second sentence of the book of
Genesis), we find that the earth was "without form and void" with
"darkness over the surface of the deep". The image is one of a sort of
cosmic emptiness and infinite deepness that cries out for infilling,
organization, illumination. Then God responds to this great void by
filling it with light, creation-wide light (some think) and then, soon
after (maybe after an infinitely short epoch of time) by creating another
gulf-the separation of light from darkness: another abyss. Could it be
that such chasmic voids, spiritual and psychological, cosmic and
relational, are inherent to the nature of creation? and could it be that,
in order to infill or span such voids, it may be necessary to face still
others, remedial and healing, paradoxical and confounding? I believe we
find ourselves in a universe of abysses. If we look towards heaven or
earth, if we ponder our relationships with other people or our own deep
heart, if we face the incongruency of reality without turning away we find
abysses-and miraculous abysses of infinite abysses. Joseph Perry ©
Greyfort Publishing.
One: The Abyss of Infinite Nearness
I thought to myself that I had a
great quote for the beginning of this chapter, "He is closer
to me than I am to myself", but where did I read it? So I
began to search my quote files for the source. I thought it was
Traherne so I clicked on the Meditations and searched for
the words "closer" and "my self" (Traherne
always wrote myself as two words.). I didn't find it so I went to
John of Ruysbroeck next. I thought, maybe it is
"nearer", not "closer". So I included more
synonyms in the search. Here is the first one I found:
"Now the grace of God . . . flows from within, and
not from without; for God is more inward to us than we are to
ourselves, and His inward thrust or working within us, be it
natural or supernatural, is nearer to us and more intimate to
us, than our own working is." The Adornment of Spiritual
Marriage. Book 2, Chapter 3.
Ruysbroeck was Flemish and lived in the thirteenth century. I
copied and pasted the quote and kept looking, wordsearching
through Evelyn Underhill's great book, Mysticism. She
quoted Meister Eckhart, a sixteenth century German mystic:
"God," says Eckhart, "is nearer to me than
I am to myself; He is just as near to wood and stone, but
they do not know it."Mysticism, from chapter
five.
"God is near us, but we are far from Him, God is within,
we are without, God is at home, we are in the far
country," said Meister Eckhart, struggling to express
the nature of this "intelligible where." Ibid.,
from chapter six.
Those were great so I pasted them too, but it didn't sound
just like the one I had in mind. So I kept lookingthrough
all my quote files till I had a bunch of them, all to the point
that God is closer to me than I am to myself. Witness: Thomas
Merton, Paul Tillich, Josef Pieper. Merton wrote in The New
Man that, not only is God close to us but, "that is why
we do not notice Him".(The New Man. New York: The
Noonday Press, Copyright, 1961 by the Abbey of Gethsemani. page
138.) Could He be so close to me that I cannot focus on Him? Or
is He so inward in my being that I cannot possibly perceive His
Presence, as I cannot perceive the presence of my liver or my
spleen in my body? Pieper held that the supernatural energy that
powers the life of the Christian comes from the very life of God,
"who is closer and more intimate to us than we are to
ourselves." Even the existentialist theologian Paul Tillich
emphasized the paradox of praying to God as "thou",
that is, as the ultimate otherall the time knowing that He
is "nearer to the I than the I is to itself", so that
the utmost other is the utmost intimate.
Next I turned to my concordances.
My search words would be: heart, wicked, near. I found this, the
word of the Lord to Samuel: ". . . man looks at the outward
appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart." (1 Samuel
16:7) and these words of God, which He spoke to Jeremiah:
"The heart is more deceitful than all else and is
desperately sick; Who can understand it? I, the Lord, search the
heart, I test the mind, even to give to each man according to his
ways" (Jeremiah 17:9). Those passages show us that there is
a gap between the heart of man and the consciousness of man. They
show us we don't easily come to know the content or character of
our own heart, that our outer self is disenfranchised from our
inner self and from our Creator. Here is a passage from a Psalm
of David:
Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me and know my
anxious thoughts; And see if there be any hurtful way in me,
And lead me in the everlasting way. (Psalm 139: 23, 24)
Why did King David have to petition God, who was apparently
far away, to discern his own inner motivations and to reveal to
him, whose thoughts should have been available to him without
reflection, his own very private thoughts as if they were
inaccessible to himas if they were enclosed in a
"locked box" to which he didn't have the key? This
should not be hard for us to accept since we know from the second
book of Samuel, chapter twelve, that David at one point had
deceived himself so completely that he required a mediator, in
this case a prophet of God, to re-connect him with the depths of
his own inner reality. Nathan came to him, sent by God, to
respectfully but firmly uncover his inner thoughts and to
connect, by means of a parable, his outer, public acts with his
unseen and unacknowledged sins of attitude. He repented. I think
he knew, and probably had always known, that there was a great
gulf, an unbridgeable gap between himself and himself, and he
knew that he must look to God to bring healing and reconciliation
even within his own divided being.
I was forcefully made conscious of
the realm of the abysses of the human soul around the time I read
The Sickness Unto Death by Søren Kierkegaard. This little
book, translated from Danish by Walter Lowrie, came at the right
time in my life. I found it at a time when, through circumstances
that were at first completely under my control (but at last
completely out of my control), I had become a victim of the lies
and pretenses of others and, due to my own vulnerability and lack
of experience, I found myself experiencing the abysses of deep
personal and interpersonal impossibility. I found myself having
to ask: "Who are these people who feel that they have to lie
to themselves and to me?" and, "Who am I, that I should
be divided asunder, in pain, confusion and bitterness?" I
remember confiding in a close friend that I felt God was
"injection-mining" my soul me with His living
water, scorching and steaming, forcing up all the bad stuff, into
the light of day. Yet with the bad came the good stuff, too. With
the dark shadows came "memories" of beauty and
preciousness. I had to face the fact that I didn't know myself
and, by the mercy of God, I had to begin to walk toward the light
(and dark) of self-knowledge and knowledge of God.
Like I said, Kierkegaard came at
the right time in my life. He showed, by fantastic arguments,
both mathematically exact and poetically beautiful, that the soul
of man is a relationship and that the many ways the soul is sick
correspond to the many ways and forms in which the soul is broken
away from relationship with itself and with the Creator who made
it. Kierkegaard proved that the despair that plagues humanity,
both corporate and individual, is the result of this broken
relationship and that the healing of that sickness comes only by
faith in Godby faith-relationship to God. The apostle Paul,
in Romans 10:17 shows that, "Faith comes by hearing, and
hearing by the word of Christ". By interpreting Kierkegaard
in this light we see that the word of Christ shows us,
respectfully but firmly, our inner disrelation and alienation,
and makes us confront and reckon with our own despair, so that we
will see well enough to know that we must reach up to God and
call out, "Save me. I want to believe!"
This is where I find myself: I am
related intimately to myself ; the very fabric of my being is so
created that I cannot get rid of myself or get away from myself.
My deep heart or psyche is always present, never sleeping or
slumbering; if I fall asleep still my inner man lives on in my
dreams and visions of the night. But at the same time I am
alienated from myself; my dreams are like strange movies made by
some unknown filmmaker from somewhere far away and I wonder what
I can do to cut the cable from this troublesome broadcaster. But
it is coming from within me, from an unacceptable inner man who
is a stranger to me; Who let this guy into my head? I don't think
he is even related to me. And that is not the only problem I
have. I also have the problem with my relationship to God. How
can I say He is infinitely near to myself, infinitely nearer to
my self than I? It seems just the opposite; it seems God is
infinitely far away from me, infinitely high and set apart.
The answer is, He is far. He is
infinitely high and lifted up. He is holy and his holiness sets
Him apart from us, so that we cannot even think of touching Him.
Though we yearn for His love and His goodness, even weep with
grief at the memory of the hope we once glimpsed, still He is far
away and we are alone. How can we cross over?
There is a bridge between
infinitely near and infinitely far, between immanent and
transcendent, There is a Way to span the gulf between
"within" and "without". It is the focal point
of history in time and space. It closed the gap between shameful
uncleanness and white-hot holiness. It is the Cross of Christ.
Because Christ bridged the chasm in His life and in His death and
because He has shared that life and death with all humankind, we
do have a crossing. And in starting forward in that Way we see
that it is not just a bridge but is also another abyss,
infinitely deep and wide: the abyss of God's Love.
I did find the passage from Thomas
Traherne's Meditations and it did not disappoint me.
Traherne loved infiniteness. He loved descibing that which could
not be described. In his second book of meditations he showed
that we humans, in the earliest perceptions of our infancy, knew
infinity before we ever knew boundaries. We knew inwardly the
boundlessness of God's creation before we ever learned the
boundaries and bondages that would press in upon us as we grew
older and "wiser." The things of this worldthe
contingent things, the anxious pressureswe learn by our
senses.
But infinity we know and feel by our souls . . . for God
is there, and more near to us than we are to ourselves. So
that we cannot feel our souls, but we must feel Him, in that
first of properties, infinite space. Traherne. The Second
Century, no. 81.
© Joseph Perry. Greyfort Publishing.
Chapter Two
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And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of compassion and supplication, so that, when they look on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a first-born.
Zechariah 12:9-11
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