Ras Mohammed Revisited
(8/1/23)
O Lover,
Yet again, how shall I hold in my awareness, as well as communicate, You—unnameable, undepictable, unimaginable? How can I assuage this itch, this draw, this propensity to ensnare You with language, however tangentially and fleetingly, yet without violating the second commandment proscription of “graven image” or “likeness” (Ex 20:4)?
Not a dream, it came to me, strangely seizing me, immediately upon awakening a week ago, a memory from just months short of a half century ago. In May of 1974 I was part of a score of tourists roughing it for a week in the Israeli-occupied Sinai, the solar-saturated days interspersed with nights on the sand mutely looking up into the splendor of Vincent’s starry night. We had arrived at the southernmost tip of the peninsula, a spit called Ras (“head”) Mohammed, separating the gulfs of Aqaba and Suez. I recall carefully adjusting my snorkeling equipment while wading out toward the visible tips of the coral reef, the Red Sea extending due south out and up into the sky.
And suddenly it is all happening yet again. From the reef I cautiously launch into a surface dive and only then re-open my eyes. In the moments following I might have dispensed with the snorkel, for I am breathless. Beyond the barrier is a sheer near-vertical coral wall dropping down into seeming infinity. A precipitous lacework of crevasses and crannies, the cliff is alive with marine life: variegated vegetation, a mosaic of darting fish of sundry sizes and splendiferous hues, other wondrous creatures for which I have neither name nor knowledge. All below me is a kind of Hildegardian viríditas. Resuming breathing, my attention is inexorably being drawn down this bio-ladder into growing dimness and, finally, opaque darkness. All the while I am suspended sans safety net out over the immeasurable abyss, like an eagle effortlessly playing the thermals of the unplumbable. I am oblivious regarding time, my cries of joy muffled by both my aquatic context and the limitations imposed by my snorkel. In time my acrophobia waxes; my breath, strength and courage wane; and I retreat across the barrier to the safe shallows.
Last week’s revisitation of Ras Mohammed was Your vehicle for ambushing me, O Lover. The profound contrast between gazing out over the surface of the Red Sea and peering down into its unplumbability imaged the fork my spiritual journey toward You has repeatedly encountered. Vive la différence! Is not the seascape’s surface placid, predictable, and prudent, a venue where we feel confident and accomplished, where we can doze and be largely oblivious to the inverted massif, the bottomlessness, of You? And do not those earliest tentative glances down into and through the translucency of Your wine-dark sea both trigger treméndum and whet an inebriating thirst which subsequent sips serve only to exacerbate? And do not our bungling explorations of the subterranean Abyss of You revivify our kinship with the viríditas of all of Your other imágo-bearers, with all other life, with all other being? And compared with the routineness, managedness, and perceived safety of life on the surface, is not the Depth of You wild, undomesticated, feral? Indeed, are You creating us merely to splash on the surface, perhaps occasionally venturing just below the surface like so many privileged tourists, or is it our raison d’etre to be be diving boldly down and down, lured by the homing [sic] signal of “deep calling to deep” (Ps 42:7)? Is not Your invitation to us ever that of Your Anointed to Simon, the waterman: “Cast out into the deep” (Lk 5:4), the venue where, in the words of Hildegard, “I am a feather on the breath of God”?
So the question persists, one eliciting daily response: which will it be?
