35/50: Trusting the Abyss
The intimacy and vastness of God meets in Psalm 139.
“If I take the wings of the dawn,
If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea,
Even there Your hand will lead me,
And Your right hand will lay hold of me.”
When I think of names that people use for God, “Abyss” is not one of them. It is a somewhat scary word – a chasm that doesn’t end, a place you would fall into and never come out of. But it is a word that Catherine of Siena, a 14th century mystic used for God in her Dialogue, a book written out of her mystical experience. Here is a sampling of what she experienced:
O eternal Trinity! O Godhead! You, eternal Trinity, are a deep sea: the more I enter you, the more I discover, and the more I discover, the more I seek you. You are insatiable; you in whose depth the soul is sated yet remain always hungry for you, thirsty for you, eternal Trinity, longing to see you with the light in your light.
O abyss! O eternal Godhead! O deep sea! What more could you have given me than the gift of your very self?
Clothe; clothe me with yourself, eternal Truth, so that I may run the course of this mortal life in true obedience and in the light of most holy faith. With that light I sense my soul once again becoming drunk! Thanks be to God! Amen.
Now that’s an experience of God! Catherine’s experience led her to reject cloistered religious life and instead, give herself to working for change in the politics of the church and in the social fabric of her time. Her passionate work was fueled by her passionate experience of God.
O Abyss! I took this name of God into my own prayer life for several years and as the name suggests, I never came to the bottom of it. After a lifetime spent in the church where God is codified and limited by our language, creeds, and codes, I want to get lost in the Great Abyss that is beyond anything I can know. I want a God who knows more than my middle-class American experience can tell me. I want a God who is beyond the light of this present life and whose love continues into eternity, whatever that will look like. Yes, Abyss is a great name for God because there is so much I don’t know and mysteries far beyond my comprehension. A God whose chasm of love does not end is the only God that makes sense to me.
The Jewish practice of not naming God is one that we should take more seriously. God does not fit inside any theological structure or church or word. And if that is true, we must never let go of a deep epistemic humility in our understanding of God. Naming God as Abyss is one way that reminds me of a mystery to great to ever fully understand.