Walking the Abyss

The 21st century has brought about some interesting changes, among them the advent of globalism and religious pluralism. We are all discovering that the world is much bigger than any of us originally conceived, that we have many neighbors and much to learn from them. Whether politically, economically, philosophically or theologically, every individual is confronted with the vastness of human perspective; we are small in the face of the universe, yes, but we are also small in the face of our own diversity. We are only now beginning to learn just how fearfully and wonderfully made we are.

But there have been push-backs against this confrontation with global vastness and the insights of our neighbors; movements have emerged everywhere, emphasizing the need for insularity and inwardness, to cease gazing into the abyss and to return to the normative simplicity of the way things were before we learned how diverse humanity is. People speak of building walls, halting the flow of immigration and the influences it can bring. Everywhere I look in the political and religious spheres, I hear polemics being thrown like so many pies.

What I want to communicate here has specifically to do with faith and our beliefs surrounding God; we hold God to be big, universal in scale, and yet so many of us are content with a small God who acts as little more than the greatest being in the order of being, or the guardian of a specific tribe. God makes sense when God is small. We can wrap our minds around that. And when God is small, the abyss I mentioned above seems smaller too, and less threatening.

The scale of globalism and religious pluralism brings the horror of that abyss into sharp focus, that same abyss into and through which we are beckoned. We hold that God is big, so big that God is what Rahner called "holy mystery," the "horizon" to which we are always moving but never arriving, the "whither" of all our self-transcendence. We are fundamentally oriented toward this horizon, this holy mystery, which while being gracious and near, is also incomprehensible and distant. We longingly seek a God beyond our epistemological scope, and for many of us, this longing leads us to the edge of the abyss. To venture into it means bringing all our cherished beliefs and traditions into question, to risk the deconstruction of our faith.

The challenges of the 21st century have forced us into a confrontation with the abyss. Having brushed up against the borders of this vast, terrifying realm, many faith communities turn inward, become insular and unwilling to acknowledge the insights other traditions may offer. It becomes a case of "us vs them," "the City of God vs the City of the World," wherein our God images turn small, as small as the tradition itself, dogmatic and exclusivist.

The believer balks at the task of seeking God with the whole heart, soul and mind. In the 21st century, seeking God with one's whole heart, soul, and mind means facing down inconsistencies, stepping outside the confines of the familiar and utilizing any set of theological language that makes sense of the fundamental longing for the divine, as articulated in the subjective experience of the individual. This is a journey that demands much and takes a heavy toll on the seeker. It is existentially much easier to simply remain in the smallness of tradition, not necessarily because the believer is ignorant (she knows how big the world is, how big God is. She can see the abyss lurking in the corner of her eye), but rather because the believer is afraid; she is afraid of the abyss, afraid of losing her faith as she has known it, afraid of the acid bath of deconstruction, and equally afraid of the subsequent reconstruction, where her faith and her very being will take on new forms that she never could have anticipated. She fears the loss and pain that seeking God entails. No one comes through the abyss without a scar or two. No one receives the gift of true life without carrying the seed of that life into the depths of the grave. We must lose life in order to gain it.

Seeking God is not for the faint of heart. It is not easy. It is not simple. It is a lifelong journey fraught with peril and the threat of losing everything to a gnawing sense of meaninglessness in an uncaring universe. Seeking God means sharing not only in hope of life after death, but sharing also in the hope of finding meaning and purpose amidst the cacophony of human theological and spiritual diversity. We carry a cross to the grave, yes, but our path to the grave passes through the abyss. For better or worse, we will not emerge from the abyss unchanged.

When I walked through the abyss, I felt at first as though I was losing everything I valued to an acid bath. My faith was deconstructed, picked apart, and it felt as if very little remained. But upon seeking help and guidance from those older and wiser than me, I learned a new metaphor; perhaps it was not an acid bath, a steady erosion and deterioration, but rather a forging. Perhaps I was clay in the potter's hands, raw ore hammered and struck upon the anvil, not destroyed or negated, but rather reborn and reformed. I could not possibly know what form I would take at the end of the painful process, but eventually the metal cooled, and my place and purpose became gradually clear.

One more personal example: I remember being in a seminar about biblical and qur'anic prophets (the  former borrowing heavily from the former, intimately related), and eventually we spoke of Jesus. Of course we did. Jesus stood in line with a long tradition of prophecy, much of what he said and did was prophetic. But given that we were studying prophets from all of the abrahamic faiths and that most of us were came from Christian faith traditions (and that we were having this discussion in a classroom on a Jesuit campus), there was an unspoken anxiety surrounding Jesus. In our digging and researching, we'd run into the elephant in the room, the potential fear lurking in the heart of every Christian: was Jesus really the son of God? The abyss loomed. We all stood at its precipice, staring into the vast nothingness the question threatened to plunge us into.

I asked the question: was Jesus really the son of God? Given what we have learned, given what I know now to be true, can I, in good faith, equate the Jesus of the New Testament to the ineffable Holy Mystery? I made no conclusions regarding the question, I merely voiced my concerns. The room was silent, not because no one spoke, but because there were no forthcoming answers and there was no one willing to plunge into the abyss to seek the truth. My concerns essentially went unanswered, and the class moved on to other topics. For a long time, I interpreted this to mean that I was stupid, that I had misunderstood something vitally fundamental to the discussion, that I had overlooked something or was simply too unintelligent to articulate the question correctly.

But I later realized that I wasn't stupid; no one answered the question, not because I was stupid and everyone else was more intelligent, but because I was brave. I alone had the courage to stare down the abyss, I alone was willing to leap into uncertainty, I alone was willing to risk the deconstruction of my faith to seek God with my entire heart, soul, and mind. No one else leapt into the void with me. I alone was courageous enough to be a walker of the abyss. I say this not to heap praises on myself, but to call the situation out for what it was. The abyss presented itself, and only one of us was willing to enter it.

Seeking God means having the courage to leave certainty and the familiar and walk into and through the abyss, to brave the valley of the shadow of meaningless and deconstruction. As believers, we face more than the prospect of the loss of the body, but also the prospect of the loss of our faith. The abyss threatens to shape us, to transmute the language of our faith as we understand it into something new and unfamiliar. We must walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we must risk our lives in order to gain them. Faith is neither comfortable nor safe; faith in the 21st century is an act of courage.

Be strong and courageous, be strong! For even in the abyss, I am with you.

God is not Beautiful; God is Beauty

Holy Mystery, Beloved, Beauty, hear my prayer:

In this moment, I finally understand what it means that you re not beautiful, but beauty itself. You are the face that always changes, is never the same, is always mystery, and yet intimately given to me.

I could watch a single face change aspects a thousand times, and it would not be enough, it would not satisfy the whither of my human self-transcendence. No, not even such a one as this could be the horizon that both endlessly teases and satisfies.

No beautiful face, no beautiful image, no work of art, however complex and no matter how visible from manifold angles, could capture what God is. God is not beautiful, God is beauty, and all art, all aesthetics, seeks to capture beauty while remaining fundamentally unable to do so. No artist can paint the face of the beloved, because she is loveliness itself; he must content himself with the lovely, and no more.

But the beloved who awaits me at the end of the aisle, by the altar, whom no third person can see or understand, is beauty beyond beauty that I can ever fully know.

I could admire a beautiful person and be captured, but there would always be the thought that this person is not all the other beautiful people who capture me. This person, however lovely, is only one instance of loveliness among many. A photo is a static instance of beauty, while a video is an attempt to give the illusion of a dynamic beauty that evolves and changes.

God, you are neither photo nor video. You are the face that shifts and changes, not as impenetrable fog, but as the dynamism of beauty itself. You are not impossible to grasp. I can hold you close, smell you, touch you, kiss you, take you by the hand and lead you to the place where we can be one, I can do all this - you do not flutter in and out of my life, but remain, because you love me. You have given yourself to me.

And yet, what is it you have given? The fullness of your mystery, the incomprehensibility of your beauty, which seem to me like the shifting and changing of an infinite sea. Your eyes are the eyes of my dreams, but of all colors and more. Your scent is the delight of my senses, but of all scents and more. Your lips are the caress of my being, but in all ways and more.

Not one image, no series of images, however beautiful, will ever satisfy me. No, I was not meant for beautiful things. I was meant for beauty itself, by your decree. And in your fundamental intention, you were meant for me too, because in spite of the wretch that I am, you love me. That is all I could ever need, because your love is mysterious dynamism itself; every moment, your love is more full and different. You beckon my reason into new frontiers, leading me through the streets, into the church, down the aisle, to the altar.

And what waits for us there? An "I do" that will not be breathed only once and then dissipate into air. It will be an "I do" that rings in air, in hearts, for all eternity.

My God, you are my joy and delight. None will ever satisfy me the way you can, because you are not beautiful; you are beauty itself.

"Heimat ist nur by Dir.

Sei mein Licht, der mir wo ich bin zeigt. Sei mein Welt, und mein Herz, dass mir wer ich bin sagt."

"I've had time to write a book about, the way you act and look; I haven't got a paragraph. Words are always getting in my way....anyway, I love you. That's all I have to tell you. That's all I've got to say."

All my life, I have vainly sought beauty in lesser instances. For that, I beg forgiveness, both for the injuries I caused myself, and the injuries I caused others.

You lift my head by the chin and turn my eyes to yours, those deep, changing pools of infinity, and you invite me in without reservation. You're not here to cleanse me of sin, you're not here to judge me to paradise, inferno or purgatory, you're not here to make ethical demands of me. No, you're here to love me, and to teach me what it is to love.

Teach me, Beauty, teach me, all the days of my life and more.

Amen