Going Deep
In response to a couple of answers to the post about churches ministering to artists, and about artists going deep:
Yes, we must all go deep: nothing special about artists in this regard. "Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." These words are like a pool of water, the bottom of which moves depending on our willingness to linger; perhaps like a quicksand, into life. For those of us raised in the traditions of our denominations, such pools are familiar, easy to look at, part of the natural scenery of our lives. Their words are pretty, easy to believe, and they've been long since digested and apprehended--so we like to think.
But I wonder sometimes if they contain vast undiscovered territory, iceberg-like, teasing us with the familiar, wanting to draw us deeper. Words are multi-layered, and God, and the writers of the books of the Bible knew this and used them in ways that confound us even today. I consider the deep transformation of a life miraculous, work done by prayer and action and the Holy Spirit of God urging us on to that which transcends our desire for control, for predictability, for safety.
I don't know what it means to go deep. Does it mean to consider God's presence in each person we meet, each performance we observe, God's spirit hovering, atmosphere-like, surrounding the world, infusing people who merely incline their hearts to him, opening their souls like hungry mouths hoping to feed, infusing those souls with power, with help, with inexplicable ephiphanies? Consider that all the suffering that can be is being endured even as we speak. I will not list them, but I'm tempted to. Take a moment and merely touch the edges of the crisis of AIDS around the world, in Africa (we heard about it yesterday in church), the marriages you that are crumbling (which is not an abstract groaning related to statistics regarding the state of marriage in America, but the wracking cries in the night of my friends who are seeing life's dreams shattered--this stuff hurts like hell), or the ones who will before today's end surprisingly find themselves at the end of all their life was, is, and will be, their souls (or beings, or consciousness, or....pick your word) winging their way back to God.
I have to go to the store soon. Buy a couple of things for my kid's lunches. Life must be lived in the face of vast vastnesses pressing down on us, realities too large for us. Ranier Maria Rilke threw himself against the unknowable in many of his poems...maybe that's why I relate to Rilke's work.
Here's a poem of Rilke's from Stephen Mitchell's beautiful translation:
LAMENT
Everything is far
and long gone by.
I think that the star
glittering above me
has been dead for a million years.
I think there were tears
in the car I heard pass
and something terrible was said.
A clock has stopped striking in the house
across the road . . .
When did it start? . . .
I would lik eto step out of my heart
and go walking beneath the enormous sky.
I would like to pray.
And surely of all the stars that perished
long ago,
one still exists.
I think t hat I know
which one it is--
which one, at the end of its beam in the sky,
stands like a white city . . .
I'll be working on this all week in non-linear fashion. I get accused of being abstract, not working in the real world, but tell me that the inner life doesn't drive the action. Action without is the mere pursuit of pleasure or escape from pain--and there are those who would say that's all it is anyway, that to see anything else is illusion. But I am coming to believe more and more in the notion of man as creator in the image of God. God's initiating action in the beginning and even now changes everything, and in that stream, I believe he has invested us with what I will call a partnering power in that same process. What is our destiny but to take action, action set into motion by our partnered inner life, a life that we must open to the atmosphere God is surrounding us with.
Perhaps ours is not to go deep, but to open wide, so that He can plunge into us, deep to the very core of us. Perhaps to Him alone belongs the work of going deep...
...but you know what I mean...
7:47:35 AM
