Into the Deep

Psalm 62

You and I are the very generosity of God, Meister Eckhart tells us.  

The life of God is lived through us - the word of God that comes from God returns to God in us, through us. Jesus’s dynamic belonging to God and the world is our life.  We exist as the generosity of God poured out into being, into motion and light and noise. 
 
And some part of us knows this.
We know it like a longing, a recognition, the home our souls yearn for deeply, the vitality we brush up against, the vibrancy we catch glimpses of.  Realer than real, there are no words that can explain it, no way to capture the fullness and completeness of the moments we taste it. We spend our lives aching to experience it, but it can’t be generated or harnessed. It can’t be summoned on command or saved up for later.  It can only be received.  We receive this life only by letting ourselves drop into our own inability to get there.  
This is infuriating to us! 
 
Also, life is busy. And it's full, and it’s complicated, and it’s hard.   
We easily caught up in the clutter, stirred up in the fervor. The noise in front of us and within us feels so loud, and so urgent, and so relentless. It feels important.  It demands our attention.
 
And we give it willingly. Because it feels good to accomplish things. It feels good to measure and weigh and gauge.  Being able to determine that we’re either really losing ground or really getting somewhere feels good.  

But, the Psalmist reminds us, 
Those of low estate are but a breath,
   those of high estate are a delusion;
in the balances they go up;
   they are together lighter than a breath. 
 
This may be true, but not comparing, not achieving, turning, emptyhanded, to face the nothingness that hovers underneath all the doing, feels terrifying.  
The emotion that might overtake us! 
The helplessness that might engulf us!
The planlessness, purposelessness, and dread of unworthiness that might swallow us whole if we stopped moving and talking! If we stopped bracing up our souls, and dropped vulnerably into the nothingness!  
No thank you. No way.  
 
So we settle for near-misses. We settle for easy satisfaction that doesn’t last. We settle for full bellies instead of full hearts, and completed to-do lists instead the completeness of souls deeply connected to other souls. We settle for the oars of striving and the rudder of giving, instead of the helpless wave of love that might crash over us and submerge us if we were to simply receive and accept. 
 
There is nothing wrong with being in life’s mess and mayhem. There is nowhere we can flee from God’s presence – God permeates all of life. God is present in the storm.  But so much of our lives are being lived through the distractions, rather than living the life the distractions are distracting us from. 

Thanks be to God, despite all our resistance, from time to time, we are plunged after all into the deep, and we experience that “without which our lives are forever incomplete.” (James Finley). And there reawakens the longing for what is most true and real. 

It happens in a tender and intimate gaze of complete acceptance, or in the heart-wrenching moment a beloved slips quietly from this life.  It comes in the from your toes laughter that sets your very cells dancing, or in the breath-catching presence of a wild animal’s quiet splendor that brings the hairs up on your arms. These moments that overtake us with the brief and overwhelming sense that we are interwoven with another, with all others, with the whole earth, the very universe, and that however terrible any one thing, or many things, might be, all is well, all is well, and all will be eternally well! 
 
The only way to this place of fullness of life coursing through us is by emptiness. It is simply to surrender. To face the nothingness. To embrace the discomfort. To both let go of our striving to get to something real, and to release our fear of getting to something real. It is to cultivate, as we’ve said, “a stance of least resistance” (JF) to being overtaken by such encounters and experiences. In other words: We wait. We wait for God.
 
For God alone my soul waits in silence; our Psalmist writes.
   from God comes my salvation. 
God alone is my rock and my salvation,
   my fortress; I shall never be shaken. 
 
For God alone our souls wait. Our souls know what they are waiting for, they are just waiting for us to join the waiting. 

And here, in this waiting, we and God together, this dynamic motionlessness of waiting with each other, for the other, here is the ground of our being. In God, with God, waiting in hushed wonder together.
 
At the deepest part of us, in the darkness below the surface absence of light, the silence beyond the shallow contrast with noise, the bottomless stillness, deep underneath the stopping of motion - there is God.
God is with us. God is closer to us than our own selves. In our absolute nothingness is God’s infinite everythingness.  We are the generosity of God.
 
For you alone, O God, my soul wait in silence.
My hope is in you.

Amen.